Late in life in in his Memoirs of a Literary Veteran (1851) R. P. Gillies reflected on a career fraught with difficulties owing to debt and other obstacles, though in it earlier stages it might be said to have paralleled in some respects the path of Walter Scott, while reaching a highpoint in the 1820s through Gillies’s significant input as a Germanist into Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. One deep regret as expressed in the Memoirs was his eventual incapacity to piece together his own literary record owing to the loss of materials at significant points in his life. The present article attempts to ameliorate this situation by providing a fuller record than was then available to Gillies himself, through means such as the recovery of rare editions, identification of periodical contributions, and information provided by the archives of the Royal Literary Fund. More particularly it offers an improved account of Gillies’s output as a novelist and translator of fiction, with some newly identified titles being added to the list, while others are removed. Continue reading →
Scott’s Waverley novels often turn on an opposition between romance—the realm of the unexpected, marvellous and heroic—and real life—the often disappointing realm of the mundane and factual. However, Rob Roy, offers readers no alternative to romance. Instead it is made up of different kinds of romance—namely the gothic and the adventure story or imperial romance. Scott maps the genre of the gothic onto Northumberland, where the remnants of feudalism still prevail, and wealth consists in landed property transmitted across generations. The adventure story, by contrast, links the Scottish Highlands with southern metropolitan Britain through a system of speculation and credit. Rob Roy reflects on Scott’s imbrication in these two systems at the time of the novel’s writing—a period of economic depression and rural depopulation—as he sold metropolitan readers another romanticised image of the Highlands in order to shore up his own landed property. Continue reading →
This collection of articles, which results from the ‘Four Nations Fiction’ conference that took place in 2013, is structured around the intersection of place with gender in terms of two vibrant research fields: the archipelagic or four nations turn within literary studies and the still-expanding map of Romantic-period women’s writing. Continue reading →
This article explores Elizabeth Hamilton’s response to the abuse of Jacobin radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain. It situates Hamilton’s fictional representations of revolutionary principles and her outspoken caricatures of contemporary radicals in her three-volume Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) within the trajectory of the gradual decline of radical voices from the mid-1790s onwards. This article demonstrates how new philosophical principles are presented in the novel as impractical and subversive in nature, as a way for Hamilton to show readers that these principles are dangerous and likely to be falsely adopted to destroy all fair domestic and public values. Ultimately, it argues for the discursive space Hamilton created to challenge and destabilise Jacobin radicalism, and also aims to shed light on the gendered conventions of public participation in the period. Continue reading →
by Emma Butcher The blow is struck—the lyre is shattered–the music is hushed at length. The greatest—the most various–the most commanding genius of modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his … Continue reading →
In 1802, James Hogg embarked on the first of three excursions into the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The young Border shepherd hoped to advance himself by leasing a farm and thereby joining the increasing … Continue reading →
by Mark Bennett To recap, for anyone who missed (or has understandably forgotten) my first two posts, I’m a PhD student working on eighteenth-century Gothic and travel writing. In a nutshell, I consider travel literature … Continue reading →
As I mentioned in my first blog for this site, the history and literature of Romantic-era Scotland is littered with grisly deaths and disturbed graves. Today I’m focusing in on a particularly infamous moment in … Continue reading →
by Daniel Cook This semester I’m convening a new upper-level undergraduate module: Scottish Literature before 1900. A couple of years ago our resident Scottish literature expert, a highly affable and active George MacDonald scholar, David … Continue reading →
by Sarah Sharp I’m Sarah Sharp and I’m a second year PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a research assistant on the New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Stevenson. Amongst my … Continue reading →
I ‘Few poetic careers can have been more thoroughly devoted to the construction of national identity than was that of Felicia Hemans’s, writes Tricia Lootens, in her contribution to Angela Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets: A … Continue reading →