Magnus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linden Bicket
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Devotional Poetry

This chapter considers the ways in which Brown adapts, develops, and treats the cult of St Magnus in literary terms. It examines Brown’s creative use of history, hagiography, and the cult of St Magnus as first seen in the Icelandic Sagas. It discusses Brown’s complex fusion of hagiographic, apocryphal, biblical and saga writings in his novel Magnus (1973) and in other devotional poetry. The chapter contends that Brown resituates a largely forgotten Norse saint within a Scottish and Scandinavian hagiographical context, while simultaneously reintroducing St Magnus into twentieth century Scottish literature.

Border Blurs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reconstruction ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Concrete Poetry ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.

Archipelagic Scotland: The Poetics of Islands and Island Poetry

Tekstualia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Insight Into

The essay proposes an exploratory discussion of the signifi cance of the the concept of islands and archipelagos in Scottish poetry. Beginning with a look at Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775) and James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), the essay recalibrates the notion of remoteness, thus attempting to challenge dominant narratives of the centre and its margins. With an overview of selected poetic representations of the islands of Scotland, the paper aims to offer an insight into the diversity of voices and approaches characterizing Scottish literature, with a brief look at the twentieth-century and twenty-fi rst century Scottish poetry including readings of selected works of such poetic fi gures as Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Don Paterson.

Extra-Terrestrials and the Heavens in Nineteenth-Century Theology

2019 ◽  
pp. 390-403
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
New Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The discoveries of late eighteenth-century astronomy bequeathed certain theological problems to nineteenth-century theologians, especially in Scotland where the Kirk’s ministers were exposed in their arts training to natural science. If other planets—as seemed likely—were inhabited, then were their populations also fallen and, if so, redeemed by Christ’s atonement on earth? Or were other divine arrangements necessary? Astronomical and soteriological questions were closely intertwined throughout the century. Scots physicists were also at the cutting edge of the new science of energy, which had implications for Christian metaphysics, including the doctrine of the afterlife. In general, however, the findings of physics and astronomy were accommodated within the existing parameters of theology. The interconnection of theology and astronomy would survive as a trope of twentieth-century Scottish literature.

Stotra as Tradition

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Hamsa Stainton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Devotional Poetry ◽  
Kashmir Śaivism ◽  
The Way

Part of the enduring appeal of the stotra form has been the way that it has enabled specific communities to creatively negotiate Kashmir’s literary and religious pasts. This chapter analyzes stotras in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries to explore how hymns have functioned as part of tradition as a process. In the seventeenth century, Sāhib Kaul’s devotional poetry provides evidence for how one community of immigrants to Kashmir integrated themselves into a complex religious and literary culture while using its Maithila Śākta heritage as a resource for innovation. In the twentieth century, Swami Lakshman Joo promoted the study and practice of stotras in influential ways. Lastly, the chapter argues that stotras have been pivotal to the configuration of “Kashmir Śaivism” as a distinct regional tradition.

‘You Got a White Voice’: Blackness in Devolutionary Scotland

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-86
Author(s):  
Joseph H. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Chapter 2 tracks the emergence of Black writers and a visible Black politics across Scottish literature in the ‘devolutionary moment’ following the referendum of 1979. The chapter proceeds chronologically, beginning with Wilson Harris’s Black Marsden (1972) as a model of Black Scottish writing, before working through the intellectual and literary context of Blackness in Scotland in the period. This history provides a two-fold excavation in order to show the under-recognised importance of Blackness in late twentieth-century Scottish writing. The first is of the significant work, particularly poetry and plays, of early Black Scottish writers Maud Sulter and Jackie Kay; and their relationship to national Scotland. The second is the expanding consciousness of Blackness both domestically and globally in the work of other Scottish writers such as Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh.

Literature and Union

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
British History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Canonical Moments ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Relationship

This volume opens up a new front in interdisciplinary literary studies. There has been a great deal of academic work—both in the Scottish context and more broadly—on the relationship between literature and nationhood, yet almost none on the relationship between literature and unions. This volume introduces the insights of the new British history into mainstream Scottish literary scholarship. The contributors, who are from all shades of the political spectrum, will interrogate from various angles the assumption of a binary opposition between organic Scottish values and those supposedly imposed by an overbearing imperial England. Viewing Scottish literature as a clash between Scottish and English identities loses sight of the internal Scottish political and religious divisions, which, far more than issues of nationhood and union, were the primary sources of conflict in Scottish culture for most of the period of union, until at least the early twentieth century. The aim of the volume is to reconstruct the story of Scottish literature along lines that are more historically persuasive than those of the prevailing grand narratives in the field. The chapters fall into three groups: (1) those that highlight canonical moments in Scottish literary unionism—John Bull, ‘Rule, Britannia’, Humphry Clinker, Ivanhoe, and England, their England; (2) those that investigate key themes and problems, including the Unions of 1603 and 1707, Scottish Augustanism, the Burns cult, Whig–Presbyterian and sentimental Jacobite literatures; and (3) comparative pieces on European and Anglo-Irish phenomena.

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