Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Introduction: Dreaming The Daily Darg, Corey Gibson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the scope of the Carnegie Trust -funded project on Working Lives in Scottish Writing since 1918, discusses the topics and theoretical perspectives explored in the research phase, noting both change and continuity from the treatment dominant in early and mid-20th century Scottish literary studies, and introduces the essays in this special issue and their contributions to the wider project theme.

‘And On One Toils, Into The Hill’: Working And Walking In Nan Shepherd’S North East, Sarah Leith

Studies in Scottish Literature

This article considers the duality of working and walking in Nan Shepherd’s writings about the North East of Scotland. Exploring Shepherd’s works from the perspectives of social and intellectual history, it considers the ways in which she represented both working and walking as labour during the first half of Scotland’s twentieth century.

Agnes Owens And The Parliament Of Insignificant Lives, Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon

Studies in Scottish Literature

This article focuses on Agnes Owens whose work is examined in the light of Michel Foucault’s essay “Lives of Insignificant Men”, and Pierre Rosanvallon’s Parliament of the Invisible. It tackles the idea that Owens portrays what Foucault calls “insignificant lives”, with a particular emphasis on working or working-class women and on what Owens sees as poverty “in [the] minds”, to show that her fiction is political in a way that is not openly militant.

Writing Loss, Culture And Change: Deindustrialisation And Community Writers’ Groups In Glasgow, Kate Wilson

Studies in Scottish Literature

No abstract provided.

Labour And (Class) Struggle In James Barke’S Compositionist Imaginaries: Dreaming With Rob Roy, Marx & Burns, Arianna Introna

Studies in Scottish Literature

James Barke’s literary imagination of working lives is primarily concerned with how different modes of labour generate a tension between refusal of work and the material constraints on fully engaging in it. Putting into conversation the Marxist autonomist method of ‘compositionism’ with Barke’s own theories of art and class struggle, this article traces how Barke’s fiction represents toil on the one hand, and the yearning for a life beyond the tyranny of capital on the other, as defining the horizons of working-class life.

James Kelman And The Impossibility Of Managerial Souls, Joseph H. Jackson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses James Kelman's portrayal of middle managers and their interactions with those they manage in "The Bevel' (1983), A Disaffection (1989), How Late It Was, How Late, (1994), and You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004), exploring their interactions with those they manage in terms of managerialism, management theories, and the U.K. government's New Public Management reforms.

‘Just Get It On The Table’: Gendered Food Labour In Janice Galloway’S Fiction, Gina Lyle

Studies in Scottish Literature

This article explores how food labour is used to articulate concerns around gendered power dynamics in Janice Galloway’s short stories and novels. By examining instances of food management and preparation, this article argues that food makes struggles for identity, autonomy, and power more clearly visible. Writing by Sarah Sceats and Mary McGlynn is used to discuss issues around women’s identity formation, while Carole Jones’s work on gender disorientation in late twentieth-century Scotland and Nick Fiddes’s materials on the prestige of meat both aid in arguments around men’s relationships with food labour.

Scottish Workers’ Stories Of Life And Labour During Covid-19 From The Workers’ Stories Project, Hailey Maxwell, Ruth Gilbert, Suki Sangha, Ewan Gibbs

Studies in Scottish Literature

This article explores how Scottish workers narrated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their life and work, by analysing 55 fifty-five submissions to the Workers' Stories Project. Between 2020 and 2022, the project creative reflections on the pandemic from workers across Scotland, drawing on the tradition of workers' inquiry and workers' education that encouraged critical reflection and the embrace of worker creativity. Submissions were overwhelmingly literary in form, primarily short prose supplemented by poetry, with three key themes emerging: intimacy and alienation; insecurity and status; and a slower living pace. Cumulatively, the stories underline how COVID-19 magnified workplace injustices …

The Ghost Of John Nisbet: Hugh Macdiarmid’S First Published Work, Alan Riach

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the first published item, a short play, signed with the name 'Hugh M'acDiamid', and sets in its biographical and historical context just after the First World War and in the literary context of 1922 and international modernism, in 1922, viewing it as 'an encapsulation of its moment, and most importantly as an elegiac tribute to a friend,' arguing that 'Performing "Nisbet" as a play intimates the drama of fractured modernist selfhood implicit in the written text,' and concluding that it should be seen 'in the whole national context of Scotland finding a way towards a reconstruction of itself, a …

Denis Saurat’S ‘The Scottish Renaissance Group’ / ‘Le Groupe De “La Renaissance Écossaise”’: An English Translation, Paul Malgrati

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents an annotated translation of Denis Saurat's 'Le Groupe de la Renaissance Écossaise' (1924), a seminal piece in the history of Scottish modernism, hitherto inaccessible in English, that introduced the works of both Christopher Murray Grieve and Hugh MacDiarmid (considered as two different entities) to the international literary scene.

Introduction: Denis Saurat On ‘“The Scottish Renaissance” Group’, Scott Lyall

Studies in Scottish Literature

Provides the biographical context and publication history for Denis Saurat’s essay ‘Le groupe de “la Renaissance Écossaise”’, which included Saurat’s French translation of some MacDiarmid poems, describes the essay’s importance in the history of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, explains some shortcomings in Saurat’s perspectives on the ‘renaissance’ and MacDiarmid’s work.

Macdiarmid The Spaceman: Extraterrestrial Space In Hugh Macdiarmid’S Poetry From Sangschaw To A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, Michael H. Whitworth

Studies in Scottish Literature

Looking at Hugh MacDiarmid’s Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), this article considers MacDiarmid’s use of science, particularly astronomy, in the 1920s. It traces known and possible sources for his scientific knowledge in books and periodicals, especially The New Age. It examines the image of light travelling through space, found in popular astronomy works by Felix Eberty and Camille Flammarion. It also compares his conception of the earth as a moving object in space with that found in poems by Thomas Hardy.

Chitterin’ Lichts: Text And Intertext In Sangschaw And Penny Wheep, Patrick Crotty

Studies in Scottish Literature

The essay takes a new look at an old subject, the role of dictionaries in Hugh MacDiarmid’s so-called ‘early lyrics’. While demonstrating that the poet’s exploration of the lexicographical remains of Scots was more thorough-going and systematic than previous accounts have suggested, it positions his recourse to dictionaries in the intertextual habit that links the lyrics both to the English sonnets and prose sketches of the young Christopher Grieve and the encyclopaedic long poems to which MacDiarmid turned after abandoning Scots in the 1930s. The article attends in particular to the wide-angle allusiveness of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep, arguing that …

‘No Further From The “Centre Of Things”’: Peripheral Citation In Hugh Macdiarmid’S In Memoriam James Joyce, James Benstead

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines Hugh MacDiarmid’s “citational poetics” – that is, his practice of selecting material from a wide range of pre-existing texts, before transforming that material and then combining it in his own work, often without attribution – and shows how reading MacDiarmid’s long 1955 poem In Memoriam James Joyce with reference to this practice places that text within the lineage of “provincial modernism” identified by Robert Crawford.

‘To “Meddle Wi’ The Thistle”’: C. M. Grieve’S Scottish Chapbook, The Little Magazine, And The Dilemmas Of Scottish Modernism, Scott Lyall

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines C. M. Grieve’s (Hugh MacDiarmid’s) most important journal enterprise, The Scottish Chapbook, which critics have assumed marks the beginning of a modernist Scottish renaissance. Against this view, this article argues that the range of contributions to the Chapbook were generally not modernist in their formal characteristics, many recalling the Victorian or fin-de-siècle periods. While the Chapbook’s brief lifespan (1922–23) was typical for modernist little magazines, the dilemmas encountered by Grieve’s periodical – restricted finances, lack of avant-garde contributors – are explained here as a side-effect of ‘localist modernism’, a concept defined by Eric B. White.

Introduction: Hugh Macdiarmid At 100, Scott Lyall

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explains the background for this special issue, Hugh MacDiarmid at 100, in the Scottish Revival Network’s conference in August 2022, which marked the centenary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s first appearance in print under that name in The Scottish Chapbook in August 1922, and then, before summarizing the themes of each essay, discusses ways in which MacDiarmid’s legacy and reputation have become central to the Scottish literary canon but somewhat marginal to canonical modernism,

Linguistic Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives In Hugh Macdiarmid’S ‘Vision Of World Language’, Fiona Paterson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the impact of an archipelagic perspective upon Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘vision of world language’ as set forth in the 1955 poem In Memoriam James Joyce. Informed by his travels to Scottish islands, documented in The Islands of Scotland (1939), and his engagements with Norn in Shetland, MacDiarmid’s vision is both expansive and particular, characterised by its decentralised plurality, and driven by an attempt to capture both simultaneity and progressivism.

Series Editors' Preface To Ssl 49.1, Patrick Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Notes the significance of the issue topic for SSL's founder G. Ross Roy, notes that C. M. Grieve was on the original editorial board in 1963, and discusses briefly ho MacDiamid has been treated in the journal over the past 60 years. Thanks the guest editors for assembling contributions that reflect current perspectives.

,

Provincialising Macdiarmid: Decolonisation And Scottish Literary History, Alex Thomson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the development of MacDiarmid's aesthetic and political views, in light of decolonial theory and criticism, as showing the 'inexorable and exigent doubling of Scotland with Empire', arguing that though MacDiarmid has been central to the construction of a postcolonial Scottish literary history, free from historical anxiety, a decolonial approach unsettles the narrative of Scotttish exceptionalism and challenges the political romanticism associated with the aesthetic construction of the national, endorsed by MacDiarmid and continued by recent cultural and literary histories [Ed.] .

The Real Christopher: Sleights Of Text And Mind Behind The Persona Of Hugh Macdiarmid, Alexander Linklater

Studies in Scottish Literature

Argues that it was the persona of Hugh MacDiarmid, as much as his poetry, which brought about the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the 1920s, but that behind the extravagant personality lay an obscure biographical puzzle. Christopher Murray Grieve possessed little personal resemblance to his pseudonymous self and even less interest in what motivated him to create such an antagonist. In this essay, the author of a new life of MacDiarmid explores how the dominant figure of 20th century Scottish literature composed himself out of found texts, psychological misdirection and confected autobiography.

Liz Lochhead And The Fairies: Context And Influence In Grimm Sisters And Dreaming Frankenstein, William Donaldson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead's period of North American travel and her response to American second-wave feminist poetics, particularly to the anthology No More Masks! (1973) and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, the treatment of myth by J.G. Frazer and Robert Graves, and the perspective on Scottish fairy tales offered by folklorists, to explore Lochhead's creative reworking of both fairy tale and classical myth in her collections Grimm Sisters (1981) and Dreaming Frankenstein (1984).

A History Of The Scottish P.E.N. Organization, Part 1: 1927-1949, Helen Stoddart

Studies in Scottish Literature

The first article in a two-part series charting the history of Scottish PEN, from its founding in 1927, through political struggles in the 1930s, and at the international congress in Edinburgh in 1934, over issues of intellectual freedom and the rise of Hitler, till the need to reestablish the organization after World War II, exploring Scottish PEN's relationship to the 20th century Scottish Renaissance movement, and examining the roles in Scottish PEN of H.J.C. Grierson, C.M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), Helen Cruikshank, William Power, Willa and Edwin Muir, and many others.

Robert Burns To Maria Riddell, A Lost Burns Manuscript And A Victorian Facsimile, Patrick Scott, Ronnie Young

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reviews the textual history of Robert Burns's brief letter to Maria Riddell, in spring 1795, in Dumfries, mentioning the miniature portrait by Alexander Reid; notes that the manuscript, owned in the late 19th century by Dr Thomas C.S. Corry of Belfast, and later by John Gribbel of Philadelphia, cannot now be located; and describes and illustrates the facsimile made of it in 1864 for Vincent Brooks in the Autographic Mirror, now the only source of this letter manuscript available to the Glasgow editorial team for the forthcoming Oxford edition of Burns's Correspondence.

Burns And Jean Armour, Ellisland, 1788: A Letter Fragment In The Roy Collection, Patrick Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes and illustrates a two-sided fragment of Robert Burns's letter from Ellisland to his wife Jean Armour, in Muchline, from September 12, 1788, concerning her move to join him, and news for his brother Gilbert. Only four letters from Burns to Jean are now known; the main body of this letter was printed by Waddell in 1869, and was later recorded in the Honresfield Collection (now the Blavatnik-Honresfield Collection), but this section, now in the G. Ross Roy Collection at the University of South Carolina, was snipped off by the then-owner Mary MacLaughlan Nicolson for a collector before Waddell saw …

Contributors To Ssl 48:2

Studies in Scottish Literature

Brief biographical notes on contributors to the current journal issue.

Walter Scott, The Two Sicilies, And Events ‘Of Recent Date’, Graham Tulloch

Studies in Scottish Literature

Traces Walter Scott's interest in Sicily and Naples through his earlier writing up to his travels to both in 1831-1832, discusses his treatment of Neapolitan history and politics in essays in 1816 and 1829, especially his accounts of Joachim Murat (1767-1815), king of Naples from 1808-1815, and in Masaniello, leader of the popular rising in 1647-48, and suggests how these interests connect to Scott's unfinished short novel Bizarro, written in 1832 but first published in 2008, so unavailable to earlier Scott scholars.

Scott’S Reparative Land Ethic, Nigel Leask

Studies in Scottish Literature

A review essay discussing Susan Oliver's "important and convincing" book Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), noting Scott's land ethic and active role in managing his estate at Abbotsford and in afforestation, and suggesting that Oliver's book presents "a cumulative literary history of Scotland’s ecologies," so that Scott's poetry and novels "assume a new relevance for 21st century readers".

Esther Inglis, Octonaries, Upon The Vanitie And Inconstancie Of The World, Edited From Folger Ms V.A.91, Jamie Reid Baxter, Georgianna Ziegler

Studies in Scottish Literature

This article provides the first-ever printed text of the poem-sequence discussed in the preceding article, Octonaries, upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the Worlde (1600), by the Franco-Scottish poet and calligrapher Esther Inglis (1571-1624). The text given here has been transcribed from one of two manuscripts of the Octonaries in the Folger Library, MS V.a.91. Variant readings from two further manuscripts, Folger MS V.a.92, and New York Public Library Spencer Coll. MS. 14, along with some glosses, are given in the following section. NOTE: The text here now (June 13) incorporates a few final editors' corrections inadvertently omitted …

Robert Watson’S Lectures At St. Andrews: Logic, Rhetoric And Metaphysics, Rosaleen Greene-Smith Keefe

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the contributions to rhetoric of Robert Watson (1730?-1781), Professor of Logic, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews from
1756-1778, and Principal from 1778-1781, based on surviving manuscript sources at St Andrews, and demonstrates the philosophic diversity in rhetorical theory at this time, showing differences among the Scottish literati on the epistemology of language and the origin of grammar, identifying some contrasts and connections between Watson and his near contemporaries Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and George Campbell, and suggesting his distinctive place in the development of 18th century rhetoric and the history of English studies.

A New Study Of Cunninghame Graham, Carla Sassi

Studies in Scottish Literature

Surveys the steady growth of interest in the Scottish fin-de-siècle writer, adventurer, socialist M.P., and nationalist leader R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936), and reviews Lachlan Munro's "timely and important study" R. B. Cunninghame Graham and Scotland: Party, Prose, and Political Aesthetic (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), judging it an "inspiring and innovative investigation," and suggesting that Cunninghame Graham's "construction and performance of his identities as a writer, adventurer, politician and activist should indeed be seen as an artistic expression in its own right."