This thesis studies contemporary Scottish fiction by four writers Agnes Owens, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Warner, focusing on the problematic position of women characters and feminocentric texts within the dominant class and national(ist) discourses. It argues that the intimate interconstitution between Scottish masculine subjects and class/national politics alienates women from an active political subjectivisation, that the gender matrix of femininity/masculinity underlies the normative selection of which gendered subjects, and accordingly whose symbolic 'voice', can be perceived as 'historical' and 'political'. Scottish working-class men and the texts in which they are the central characters have been considered paradoxically as both a literary reflection of 'political defeatism', but also a form of 'subaltern' counter-politics to British neoliberalism and imperialism. This thesis points out that the common parameters of the debate on the possible (dis)continuation of both class and national(ist) discourses are masculinist, and as such women tend to be perceived as 'non-political' in this (re)politicisation of aesthetics. More fundamentally, these discourses are problematic for women's politicisation because they follow the rule of modern politics which assigns politicality on a fraternal basis, that political struggles are between men of different classes, nationalities and so on. The research interrogates this masculine-centrism in the dominant representational praxis which provides the discursive link between literature, politics, and history which (dis)places feminine subjects into a 'dehistoricised', 'depoliticised' space. It seeks to renegotiate the fraternal terms of this practice and to read feminine subjects and women-centred narratives as capable of conceptually illustrating emancipatory politics.

This is a critical study of Hamish Henderson (1919-2002). It examines his work as a poet, translator, folklorist, and cultural and political commentator. Through close textual analysis, this project shows how Henderson’s various writings can be considered part of a life-long engagement with the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics. This includes the purpose of poetry and its relation to ‘the people’; the defining qualities of folk culture and its political potential; conceptions of nationalism and internationalism; and notions of Scottish history and ‘tradition’. Bemoaning a modern disconnect between the artist and society, Henderson explored the possible causes of this disjuncture and proposed various solutions. His views on these issues were tested in a series of public ‘flytings’, or opinion column debates, with the poet Hugh MacDiarmid between 1959 and 1968. Chapter One is an analysis of the form and content of these exchanges. In Chapter Two, Henderson’s poetic responses to the War, his collected Ballads of World War II (1947) and Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948), are considered in light of his professed aim to create a poetry that ‘becomes people’. Chapter Three examines Henderson’s relationship with the life and works of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Drawing from Henderson’s translation of Gramsci’s prison letters, this chapter examines how the Italian thinker both validated and undermined his approach to folk culture. Chapter Four considers Henderson’s perceived ‘turn’ away from art-poetry towards folk-song. With reference to his writings on various poets, his own poetry and song, and that of others that he admired, this chapter reflects on Henderson’s ideas about the distinctiveness of the Scottish literary tradition, and about the politics of authorship. Chapter Five interrogates Henderson’s various writings on folk culture according to his role as a ‘folk revivalist’ who seeks to reinstate folk-song as a popular mode of collective selfexpression, and as a ‘folklorist’ who documents the folk tradition. This project argues for a holistic examination of Henderson’s cultural politics, restoring his writings to their original contexts and providing an account of the constantly renegotiated relationship between art and society present throughout his work.

Zugl.: Chemnitz, Univ., Diss., 2004

Participants in the critical enterprise of “Law and Literature” tend to center their arguments on the question of literature’s utility to the study and practice of law. I focus instead on the reciprocal corollary: how can an understanding of law influence a critical reading of literature? Taking cues from discussions in Renaissance studies of law and literature and drawing on my own legal training, I assert that transatlantic literary studies provides both a conceptual framework for positing a reciprocal relationship between law and literature and, in nineteenth century Scottish and American depictions of property and criminal law, a crucial test case for this exploration by uncovering new “legal fictions” within these texts. I begin my first chapter by situating my work within recent critical work in Law and Literature. While most scholarship in the “law in literature” subcategory since James Boyd White’s influential 1973 text The Legal Imagination has focused on how (and if) literary studies can help current and future legal practitioners through what Maria Aristodemou calls “instrumental” and “humanistic” mechanisms, recent work, particularly by a dedicated group of interdisciplinary scholars in Renaissance studies, has focused on the law’s benefit to literary studies in this field. I explore the critical mechanisms employed by these scholars as well as by scholars in nineteenth century literary studies such as Ian Ward. I then turn to transatlantic literary studies, arguing that the approaches outlined by Susan Manning, Joselyn Almeida, and others provide a framework that can give nineteenth-century literary studies a similar framework to that proposed by Aristodemou: an “instrumental” method of giving greater precision to discussions of how historical institutions and hierarchies are depicted in nineteenth century literature, and a “humanistic” method of extending beyond historicist approaches to see beyond the often artificial demarcations of literary period and genre by finding commonalities that transcend disciplinary and historical borders. I conclude this introduction by identifying the legal and literary parameters of my project in the legal-political tensions of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Scotland and America. My second chapter focuses on property law and the question of inheritance, reading Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and The Bride of Lammermoor alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to demonstrate how the narratives play with two dueling theories of inheritance law – meritocratic and feudal – and how those dueling legal theories impact the events of the tales themselves. After outlining tensions between older but still prevalent ideas of feudal succession and newer but admittedly flawed in execution notions of meritocratic land transfer, I explore how Scott’s and Hawthorne’s narratives demonstrate the inability of their characters to reconcile these notions. Both Rob Roy and The House of the Seven Gables seem to demonstrate the triumph of deserving but legally alienated protagonists over their titled foes; both novels, however, end with the reconciliation of all parties through ostensibly love-based weddings that perform the legal function of uniting competing land claims, thus providing a suspiciously easy resolution to the legal conflict at the heart of both stories. While reconciliation makes the legal controversies at the heart of these stories ultimately irrelevant, the legal nihilism of The Bride of Lammermoor takes the opposite tactic, demonstrating both the individual shortcomings of the Ashton and Ravenswood families and the systemic failure of Scottish property law’s feudalism to achieve equitable outcomes. I next turn to the question of insanity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and James Hogg’s “Strange Letter of a Lunatic,” arguing that both narratives complicate the legal definition of insanity by showing gaps between the legislative formulation and actual application to their fictional defendants. After developing the different viewpoints towards criminal culpability articulated by the American (but based on English law) and Scottish versions of the insanity defense, I turn first to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s narrator, I argue, deliberately develops a narrative that takes him outside the protections of the insanity defense, insisting on his own culpability despite – or perhaps because of – the implications for his own punishment. Meanwhile, Hogg’s narrative, both in its original draft form for Blackwood’s and its published version in Fraser’s, paints a different picture of a narrator who avoids criminal punishment but finds himself confined in asylum custody. These two areas of inheritance and insanity collide in my exploration of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frank Norris’s McTeague, where I illustrate the relationship between the urban demographics and zoning laws of both the real and fictional versions of London and San Francisco and the title characters’ mentally ill but probably not legally insane murderers. After demonstrating Stevenson’s and Norris’s link between psychology and the complex amalgamations of their fictional cityscapes, I demonstrate how these cityscapes also allow them to sidestep rather than embrace mental illness as an excuse for their murderous protagonists’ crimes, indicting the institutions at the center of their texts as equally divided and flawed.

abstract: The union between England and Scotland, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain, generated heated discussion both before and after the Acts of Union took effect on May 1, 1707. Members of Parliament, the nobility, clergymen, pamphleteers, and authors from both nations participated in debates on the Union, in many kinds of writing, for many years after 1707. The voices of British women, however, have not been sufficiently considered in our scholarship, and are often conspicuously absent from our accounts of these polemical wars, which were still raging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap in the academic conversation by taking Scottish, English, and British nationalisms as its theoretical paradigm in approaching writing by female authors. The dissertation's chapters examine how the Anglo-Scottish Union figures in the works by five women writers (Jane Austen, Cassandra Cooke, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier) publishing from 1780 to 1820. I argue that, in the aftermath of the Union, these women writers often expressed specifically gendered concerns— such as the maintenance of social etiquette, better education for women, making sense of national prejudices, and the erasure of regional socio-economic differences. In doing so, they ranged beyond a typically masculine focus on parliamentary politics, international military endeavors, macro economy, and national churches. English women writers' attitudes towards the Union were more positive than those entertained by Scots authors, but compared with contemporary male writers, both sides were less optimistic about the potential for building a blanket national identity for the entire Kingdom. Taken together, the chapters of the dissertation provide a more comprehensive view of how the Anglo-Scottish Union figured in the minds of Britons, male and female, a century after its establishment, when the Kingdom was going through the Napoleonic Wars and another union with Ireland. The dissertation enriches our research on women's use of literary genres and techniques when taking part in political debates. It also serves to point out the need for more extensive surveys of the nuances of individual women writers' national affiliations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

The thesis examines transnational Scottish book marketing to a diasporic audience from 1995 to 2015. The study addresses the research question: what makes marketing of Scottish-interest books from Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the publishing industry successful transnationally? The data underlying the research comes from semi-structured interviews with members of publishing organisations in Scotland and members of Scottish heritage organisations worldwide, case studies of the marketing histories of economically successful books targeting the diaspora, and narrative rhetorical criticism of the online book blurbs of Scottish-interest books by Scottish publishers. The qualitative results demonstrate that the marketing of Scottish-interest books from SMEs in the publishing industry is successful transnationally when creative relationship marketing through storytelling is emphasised; icons, symbols and narratives from Scotland’s place brand are utilised; and communication of value is targeted to specific subcultures of consumption (like the Scottish diaspora) that transcend national boundaries. Adopting the definition of marketing as the communication of value of a product or service, the study analyses the influencers, characteristics, and participants of that communication. The research impacts those individuals and organisations, particularly Scottish publishing companies, who are involved in the twenty-first century Scottish book trade. The thesis recommends that to reach the diaspora audience, Scottish publishers need to make a more united effort under Publishing Scotland to approach and partner with Scottish heritage organisations; create working relationships with Global Scot (and Scottish Enterprise more generally), Scottish Development International, Visit Scotland, and Event Scotland; and become more involved in tourism events relating to the Scottish diaspora.

No description available.

This thesis explores James Macpherson’s The Highlander (1758) in relation to originality, Scottish identity and historiography. It also situates the Ossianic Collections in the context of Macpherson’s earlier poetical and later historical works. There are three parts to it: a biographical sketch of Macpherson’s early life, the annotated edition of The Highlander, and discursive commentary chapters. By examining The Highlander in detail this thesis questions the emphasis of other Macpherson criticism on the Ossianic Collections, and allows us to see him as a writer who is historically minded, very aware of sources, well versed in established forms of poetry and thoroughly, and positively, British. The Highlander stands out among the corpus of his works not because it can give us insights into the Ossianic Collections, which is its usual function in Macpherson criticism, but because it can help us understand what it is that connects Macpherson’s earlier and later works with the Ossianic Collections: history, Britishness, tradition. Macpherson’s poetical works are united by a desire to translate Scotland’s factual past into sentimental British poetry. In the Ossianic Collections he does so without particular faithfulness to his sources, but in The Highlander he converts historical sources directly into neo-classic verse. This is where Macpherson’s originality lies: his ability to adapt history. In different styles and genres, and based on different sources, Macpherson’s works are early examples of Scotland’s great literary achievement: historical fiction. Instead of accusing him of forgery or trying to trace his knowledge of Gaelic ballads, this thesis presents Macpherson as a genuine historian who happened to write in a variety of genres.

This thesis is a critical study of Scottish literary culture since 1989. It examines and interrogates critical work in Scottish literary studies through a ‘critical nationalist’ approach. This approach aims to provide a refinement of cultural nationalist literary criticism by prioritising the oppositional politics of recent Scottish writing, its criticism of institutional and state processes, and its refusal to exempt Scotland from this critique. In the introduction I identify two fundamental tropes in recent Scottish literary criticism: opposition to a cultural nationalist critical narrative which is overly concerned with ‘Scottishness’ and critical centralising of marginalised identity in the establishment of a national canon. Chapter one interrogates a tendency in Scottish literary studies which reads Scottish literature in terms of parliamentary devolution, and demonstrates how a critical nationalist approach avoids the pitfalls of this reading. Chapter two is a study of two novels by the critically neglected and politically Unionist author Andrew O’Hagan, arguing that these novels criticise an insular and regressive Scotland in order to reveal an ambivalent, ‘Janus-faced’ nationalism. Chapter three examines representations of Scottish traditional and folk music in texts by A. L. Kennedy and Alan Bissett, engaging with the Scottish folk tradition since the 1950s revival in order to demonstrate literature and music’s ambivalent responses to aspects of literary and cultural nationalism. Chapter four examines texts by Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, analysing the relationships they construct between gender, nation and class. Chapter five examines three contemporary Scottish texts and elucidates an ethical turn in Scottish literary studies, which reads contemporary writing in terms of appropriation and exploitation.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.