‘Magnus's vision of a resurgent Scotland was elusive as a unicorn’: Scottish Nationalism in Eric Linklater's Magnus Merriman

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-173
Author(s):  
Adam Gilbert

Eric Linklater's 1934 novel Magnus Merriman is recognised as a comic triumph for its satirical treatment of the Scottish Renaissance and the associated contemporary Scottish nationalist movement. This article argues that Magnus Merriman has deceptive depth because Linklater offers frequently profound insights into a compelling point in Scottish cultural and political history. The misadventures of the eponymous Magnus have strong parallels with Linklater's own belated entry into the Scottish Literary Renaissance and his disastrous attempt at standing for parliament as a Scottish nationalist candidate. The novel showcases Linklater's idiosyncratic political doctrine of ‘small nationalism’, and his unflattering portrayal of the National Party of Scotland is coloured by his disillusionment with it. The doomed poem written by Magnus, ‘ The Returning Sun’, symbolises the Scottish Renaissance, reflecting its shortcomings and the difficulty of forming a unified Scottish cultural identity. The character of Magnus himself embodies the lack of a single, coherent Scottish identity as a Scottish Renaissance anti-hero. Magnus's political and literary disappointments mean Linklater gives a pessimistic assessment of the relative failure of the Scottish Renaissance and the nationalist movement of the period. Linklater's irreverent examination of Scottish nationalism retains contemporary relevance. Magnus Merriman is more than just a hilarious comedy and represents a significant contribution to Scottish literature.

Author(s):  
Khagendra Sethi ◽  
Tithi Ray

This article aims at a comparative study of GopinathMohanty with Mulk Raj Anand. The article will analyse and examine the works of both the writers from the perspective of Resistance literature. Both of them have significant contribution to Dalit literature. These two writers are non-dalits. But they have comprehensive understanding on the plight of these miserable sections who are on the margin. They have tried their best to fight for their rights. Along with that they have created for them a distinct cultural identity by dismantling their colonial identity. They have raised voice against the ethical issues like bonded labour, economical exploitation, socio-political exclusion, land displacement and sexual harassment which were immanent in dalit’s life in colonial and post-colonial India.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alia Afiyati ◽  
Divya Widyastuti ◽  
Yoga Pratama

In a literary work, two characters can be narrated as the attention center that contains the cultural identity from certain generation. Meanwhile, a symbol actually can cause an interaction within characters. This research discusses about cultural identity and symbolic interactionism reflected in a novel. There is a novel entitled “Recipe for a Perfect Wife” by Karma Brown that tells about two female characters that are represented as a housewife from different generation. This research uses descriptive qualitative as the research methodology and content  analysis as the method in analyzing the object of the research, a novel entitled “Recipe for a Perfect Wife”. This research also uses the intrinsic approach to analyze the characterization, plot, and setting. This research reveals two kinds of a housewife. They are a housewife and working woman, and a full-housewife. This research finds five cultural identities in the past and present time that is related with a housewife reflected by two female characters in the novel by using cultural identity theory by Stuart Hall. This research also reveals the symbol and memory even three concepts of symbolic interactionism that is mind, self, and society based on symbolic interactionism theory by George Herbert Mead.


2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.


2020 ◽  
pp. 137-179
Author(s):  
Iain Crawford

Building on the case made in chapter 3, chapter 4 tunes to consider Martin Chuzzlewit and examines the ways in which the novel addresses the relationship between literacy, print media, and the experience of modern urbanism. Together eith its predecessor, the chapter argues that for Dickens America was far more than what has been generally perceived as an increasingly negative experience that chastened his understanding of the press and of mass culture. Rather, and notwithstanding all his complaints about Americans, tobacco, and spit, the encounter with America in fact provided him with a new sense, at once disturbing and alluring, of the potential power of a cheap mass-market press led by entrepreneurial editors operating in a print environment unconstrained by state controls. Moreover, in writing about America, and above all in writing about its newspapers in both American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens for the first time discovered a methodology for fusing fiction and the press in ways that would be foundational his most significant contribution to Victorian journalism, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round.


Author(s):  
Margery Palmer McCulloch

Catherine Carswell was one of an increasing number of women who tested boundaries in life and literature in the early years of the 20th century. Born Catherine Macfarlane in Glasgow, she made legal history in 1908 when her first marriage was annulled on the grounds of her husband’s mental incapacity. She supported her daughter of the marriage through journalism, writing fiction reviews for the Glasgow Herald and drama criticism for the Observer and was dismissed by the Glasgow Herald for publishing her review of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow without previous editorial consent. Her compensation was a friendship and correspondence with Lawrence which lasted until his death. She published two novels, Open the Door which was copiously critiqued by Lawrence and won the Melrose prize for fiction in 1920; and The Camomile published in 1922. Her biography of Robert Burns (1930) outraged the Scottish Burns Clubs owing to its treatment of Burns as a sexual being, and her memoir of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage (1932) was written in refutation of John Middleton Murry’s Son of Woman. Her work made a significant contribution to modern Scottish literature.


1983 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Robinson Divine

The starting point for explaining modern Palestinian political history is the assumption that Palestinians failed to organize adequately during the British Mandate (1918–1948), were defeated by the Zionist movement, and consequently dispersed from their homeland. That Palestinians did not unite politically during this crucial period in their history, nor cooperate economically, nor even band together militarily is considered corollaries of this organizational incapacity and reasons enough for their failure to achieve a national sovereignty of their own. Thus Porath notes that ultimately no Palestinian political organization could bridge the divisions of region, family, and narrow economic or political interest which encouraged the proliferation of parties and weakened the drive against Zionism. Ann Mosely Lesch calls her book on Arab politics in Palestine, “the frustration of a nationalist movement.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 80 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Timothy S. Chin

Analyses the novel 'Brown girl, brownstones' (1959) by Paule Marshall. Author argues that this novel offers a complex and nuanced understanding of how Caribbean migration impacts upon cultural identity, and how this cultural identity is dynamically produced, rather than static. He describes how the novel deals with Barbadian migrants to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, and further elaborates on how through this novel Marshall problematizes common dichotomies, such as between the public and the private, and between racial (black) and ethnic (Caribbean) identity. Furthermore, he indicates that Marshall through her representation of the Barbadian community, foregrounds the central role of women in the production of Caribbean identity in the US. In this, he shows, Bajan women's talk from the private sphere is very important. Further, the author discusses how the Barbadian identity is broadened to encompass Caribbean and African Americans in the novel, thus creating transnational black diaspora connections, such as by invoking James Baldwin and Marcus Garvey.


2020 ◽  
pp. 23-30
Author(s):  
Vasyl Brych ◽  
Natalia Galysh

Introduction. Tourism is an important area of socio-economic activity and makes a significant contribution to the state budget revenues of many countries. The growing importance of tourism and the exacerbation of problems associated with its development, make us talk about the need for change and the search for new vectors of development. This has led to numerous attempts to adapt the main provisions and principles of the concept of sustainable development in the context of the functioning of tourism. It should be noted that the first attempt to define sustainable tourism was made in 1988 by the World Tourism Organization. Sustainable tourism was seen as a direction that leads to the management of all resources in such a way that economic, social and aesthetic needs can be met while preserving cultural identity, basic environmental processes, biodiversity and life support systems. Goal. The purpose of the study is to introduce aspects of sustainable development of tourism as a purposeful influence on the processes of formation and maintenance of the tourist and recreational environment in the interests of society. Method (methodology). The methodological basis of the study were interdisciplinary and systematic approaches to the study of the functioning of the tourism industry. Results. This article reveals the features of the tourism industry from the standpoint of sustainable development.


Author(s):  
Наталья Евгеньевна Купцова

Введение. Представлена совершенно неисследованная тема в отечественном лермонтоведении – академическая рецепция романа М. Ю. Лермонтова «Герой нашего времени» в США. Автор статьи собрала наиболее представительные на сегодняшний день публикации, вышедшие в США за всю историю американского лермонтоведения и посвященные этому роману. Цель – провести исследование академической рецепции романа М. Ю. Лермонтова «Герой нашего времени» в США. Материал и методы. Поиск публикаций, посвященных роману М. Ю. Лермонтова «Герой нашего времени», вышедших в США, и их анализ по предложенной автором периодизации. Результаты и обсуждение. Предложена периодизация по трем периодам: публикации 1900–1960-х гг., публикации 1970–1980-х гг. и публикации 1900-х гг. по настоящее время. Особенностями публикаций 1900–1960-х гг. является прежде всего осмысление того, как М. Ю. Лермонтов изобразил русское общество 1830-х гг. и главного героя своего произведения, акцент на психологичности романа, а также сравнение с героями А. С. Пушкина. Среди исследователей нет согласия относительно жанра романа – так, Мерсеро относит его к жанру психологического реализма, а в предисловии к первому англоязычному изданию в США отмечен байронический характер Печорина. Для публикаций 1970–1980-х гг. наблюдаются совершенно другие акценты у американских исследователей. На первое место выходит интерес к внутреннему устройству романа: его фабуле, сюжету, структуре. Несмотря на то, что по-прежнему нет полного согласия относительно жанровой принадлежности романа, большинство исследователей считают, что именно в роман «Герой нашего времени» покончил с романтизмом в русской прозе, в чем и заключается его главное новаторство. Изменился и взгляд на главного героя романа – в Печорине видят уже не байронические, а демонические черты. На современном этапе изучения романа «Герой нашего времени» у американских исследователей появляются новые темы в изучении романа. Так, например, красной нитью проходит тема отражения в романе взаимоотношений между русскими и кавказскими народами. Кроме того, если раньше в центре внимания исследователей был только Печорин, то теперь изучаются и другие герои и героини романа. Интересно и то, что Печорина теперь считают постромантическим героем и сам роман большинство исследователей считают постромантическим. Заключение. Проведенный анализ и предложенная периодизация наглядно иллюстрируют эволюцию интереса исследователей из США к различным аспектам романа и его героев. Библиографический список статьи внушителен и сам по себе представляет значительный интерес и вклад в лермонтоведение. Авторы публикаций, вошедших в обзор, – филологи, публицисты, политологи и антропологи. Introduction. The article is devoted to the completely unexplored subject in Russian Lermontov studies – the academic reception of the novel “Hero of our time” by the scholars from the USA. In the article the most reputable and representative works published in the USA about this novel are outlined and analyzed in accordance with the following periodization: publications of 1900-1960s, publications of 1970-80s and the modern publications of 1900s until now. The goal. Research of the academic reception of the novel of M. Lermontov «Hero of our time” in the USA. Materials and methods. Search and analysis of the publications, devoted to the novel “Hero of our time” by M. Lermontov issued in the USA in accordance with the periodization proposed by the author. Results and discussion. The focus of publications 1900–1960s is primarily the understanding of how M.Yu. Lermontov portrayed the Russian society of the 1830s and the main character of his work, an emphasis on the psychological nature of the novel, as well as a comparison with A.S. Pushkin. Among the researchers there is no agreement on the genre of the novel - for example, Mercereau classifies it as a genre of psychological realism, and in the preface to the first Russian-language edition in the United States, the Byronic character of Pechorin is noted. In publications from the 1970s to 1980s, there is a completely different emphasis. First of all, the internal structure of the novel is in the focus. Despite the fact that there is still no full agreement on the genre of the novel, most researchers believe that the novel «A Hero of Our Time» that he put an end to romanticism in Russian prose, which is the main innovation of Lermontov. The view on the main character of the novel has also changed - in Pechorin they see not Byronic, but demonic features. At the present stage, American researchers have new topics in the study of the novel «Hero of our time”. For example, the topic of the relationship between the Russian and Caucasian peoples attracts a lot of attention. In addition, if earlier only Pechorin was in the center of attention of researchers, now other heroes and heroines of the novel are also being studied. It is also interesting that Pechorin is now considered a post-romantic hero, and most researchers classify the novel as post-romantic. Conclusion. The conducted analysis and the proposed periodization demonstrably illustrates the evolution of approaches and interest to the various aspects of the novel and its heroes. The bibliography of the article is impressive itself and makes a significant contribution to the Lermontov studies. The authors of the publications included in the review are philologists, publicists, political scientists, anthropologists.


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