Scottish Literary Review最新文献

{"title":"Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives Edited by Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher (review)","authors":"C. Sassi","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-3141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-3141","url":null,"abstract":"This is a rich and fascinating collection of essays, engaging with, as the title suggests, an attempt to throw a bridge of dialogue between two areas of investigation that have always shared a number of important thematic and theoretical concerns ^ among these, a critical distance from the cultural practices of the metropolitan centre of the Empire, an anti-imperial and antihegemonic stance, a critical questioning of the ‘English’ canon and a sense of inhabiting a temporal and ideological ‘aftermath’ (whether post-colonial or post-British) ^ and that yet have kept at a guarded (critical) distance from each other. They also share, as Michael Gardiner highlights in the introduction to the volume, a recent de¢nitional crisis, whereby ‘the terms of both the postcolonial and of (stateless) Scottishness indicate tendencies which can be discerned by careful readings, not categories of text’, so that ‘the question of whether a text is or is not postcolonial is misguided, and the question of whether a text is or is not Scottish is not far behind’ (p. 2). Gardiner’s introduction raises a number of important issues and highlights intersections between the two ¢elds, but ^ inevitably, given the vastness and complexity of the ¢eld ^ leaves a few crucial questions untouched or barely touched. To claim, for example, that ‘Anglo-American postcolonial studies . . . has been less able to challenge the discipline of English Literature than has the allegedly ethnic ¢eld of Scottish Literature’ (p. 3) seems to invoke more a potential than a reality, given the relative dearth of Scottish authors that are part of the English canon, as much as the subsequent hint at the fact that there is a ‘natural a⁄nity’ (p. 7) linking the two ¢elds in object may appear as an attempt to bypass a sustained analytical evaluation of disciplinary relations. Also, the call for ‘a more mature internationalism’ (p. 7) seems to be more related to a speci¢cally Marxist approach than in line with recent postcolonial celebrations of £uid transnationalism. The main focus of the introduction, on the history of the development of English Literature as a discipline in relation to both postcolonial and Scottish literature, is however of great interest and certainly opens up new paths of interdisciplinary understanding. The structure of the collection is conventionally chronological and con-","PeriodicalId":40783,"journal":{"name":"Scottish Literary Review","volume":"6 1","pages":"143 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71136519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro","authors":"R. Lansdown","doi":"10.1163/9789004356856_009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004356856_009","url":null,"abstract":"This essay seeks to make and substantiate a bold claim: that Not Not While the Giro, published in 1983, is the most distinguished set of short stories issued in the United Kingdom since World War Two. Furthermore, even if other collections — by Sylvia Townshend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen, John Fowles, V. S. Pritchett, Alan Sillitoe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Angela Carter, for example — were felt to be of greater artistic merit, Kelman’s should still be regarded as the most important, capturing as it does with an urgency worthy of its subject the decline of working-class male culture in the ‘postindustrial’ Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This discussion sees the collection in very general evaluative terms, therefore. In particular, before it turns to Kelman’s stories in detail, it needs to establish the political and aesthetic background to their success, and to explore how the political and the aesthetic ultimately found their places and proportions in his achievement.","PeriodicalId":40783,"journal":{"name":"Scottish Literary Review","volume":"6 1","pages":"67 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64539094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society ed. by Regina Hewitt (review)","authors":"Ainsley McIntosh","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1929","url":null,"abstract":"Unlike his literary contemporaries Walter Scott and James Hogg, who have enjoyed a substantial critical recovery in the late twentieth and early twenty¢rst centuries, John Galt has continued to su¡er from relative obscurity. This volume, containing ¢fteen wide-ranging essays by leading critics of Scottish Romantic literature, represents a landmark move towards redressing this critical imbalance by uncovering Galt’s unique and wide-ranging contribution to the literary terrain of his time and asserting his position as a writer of particular signi¢cance for ours. The collection’s subtitle is charged simultaneously with meaning in Scottish Enlightenment historiographical terms, and with interpretative signi¢cance for contemporary social theory, relative in both contexts to how social knowledge is constructed. It indicates that aspect of Galt’s ¢ctional achievement, ‘his ability to represent people acting in society’ (\" ), of greatest signi¢cance here, and the network of contingencies through which the volume’s contributors engage with his writing. The volume is organised into four topical thematic sections: ‘progress, memory, and communities’; ‘con£ict and consensus’; ‘justice and tolerance’; ‘identities and ethics’. These broad classi¢cations allow the scope of its discussion to move beyond the parameters of conventional literary criticism, so that Alyson Bardsley reads Ringan Gilhaize; or, The Covenanters within the context of trauma studies and Regina Hewitt draws upon social theory in her comparative analysis of Eben Erskine; or, The Traveller and selected works of Harriet Martineau. This arrangement facilitates both fresh readings of Galt’s most frequently discussed works, and the ¢rst sustained critiques of lesserstudied texts, including Rothelan, and the Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew. This interdisciplinary approach to Galt be¢ts so multifaceted a writer; and these essays celebrate the incredible diversity of Galt’s oeuvre, which includes experimental forays into the writing of novels, poetry, drama, short stories, sketches, tales, travelogues, biography, autobiography, dramatic criticism, children’s literature and political journalism. An awareness of how Galt exploits the potentialities of generic properties and narrative strategies to form conjectures about the dynamics of community-formation at the","PeriodicalId":40783,"journal":{"name":"Scottish Literary Review","volume":"5 1","pages":"121 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71139984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone by Andrew Monnickendam (review)","authors":"Tony Jarrells","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-4868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-4868","url":null,"abstract":"Georg Luka¤ cs may have dismissed the supposedly second-rate novelists who were forerunners of Walter Scott’s ¢ction. But at least since Ina Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority (\"ææ\"), Peter Garside’s ‘Popular Fiction and National Tale’ (also \"ææ\") and, a few years later, Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (\"ææ ), scholars have thought it important to recover the works of Scott’s fellow writers and to connect the form and features of his popular brand of historical ¢ction to the rich literary ¢eld of Romantic Scotland. Andrew Monnickendam’s book, The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations, can be added to this growing list of titles. He surveys the work of three female writers of the period ^ Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone ^ in order to highlight ‘a rather di¡erent Great Unknown than we have been accustomed to’ (Æ). Monnickendam cites Ian Duncan’s recent book, Scott’s Shadow: the Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Æ ), as his immediate inspiration. As Duncan reads Scott in relation to writers such as James Hogg and John Galt, so Monnickendam suggests that the writers in his study share a set of concerns, or ‘similar situations’ (\" ), with their famous fellow author. The novels of Brunton, Ferrier and Johnstone, he says, ‘illuminate, inform, engage with [and] in£uence’ (Æ ) Scott in ways that challenge the familiar account of his ¢ction’s assumed ideological stability. The line of in£uence or engagement drawn in Walter Scott and his Literary Relations, however, is far less direct than it is in Duncan’s book. Monnickendam focuses on a group of novels mostly written in the few years before or after Waverley (\" \"a), including Brunton’s Self-Control (\" \"\"), Discipline (\" \"a) and the posthumously published Emmeline and Other Pieces (\" \"æ); Ferrier’s Marriage (\" \" ), The Inheritance (\" Æa) and Destiny (\" \"); and Johnstone’s Clan-Albin (\" \" ) and Elizabeth de Bruce (\" Æ ). Each of the ¢rst three chapters is devoted to one of the three writers and each chapter is divided into similar sections: ‘Literary persona’; ‘Heroinism’ (a word used by Johnstone in Clan-Albin); ‘Parents and education’; ‘Location’; and ‘Cul-de-sac’. Monnickendam provides careful readings of individual literary works and elaborates upon the conditions that shaped the ¢ction and the","PeriodicalId":40783,"journal":{"name":"Scottish Literary Review","volume":"5 1","pages":"115 - 117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71141296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}