Scottish Literary Review

SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW is the leading international journal for Scottish literary studies, committed to approaching Scottish literature in an expansive way through exploration of its various social, cultural, historical and philosophical contexts, and of literary forms, both traditional and new. We are interested in comparative work with literatures from beyond Scotland, the interaction of literature with expressive media such as theatre and film, and in encouraging debate on issues of contemporary significance related to Scottish literary studies, so that SLR is both responsive to, and creative of, new readings and approaches. The journal is listed in the MLA International Bibliography and issues from 2013 onwards are accessible online as part of Project MUSE’s Premium Collection.

Editor’s Introduction

In a previous editorial (SLR 6:2, Autumn/Winter 2014) I remarked upon the paucity of submissions to the journal in the medieval and renaissance periods. Interestingly, this situation seems for the moment to have changed. In the present issue, there is Doyeeta Majumder on politics and form in Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of The Thrie Estaits; and there is more from the ‘early period’ of Scottish literature in the next issue of SLR (the first one of 2017). The long ‘Romantic’ period of Scottish literature is strongly represented in this SLR with Gerard McKeever looking at Robert Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ within a current critical hotspot for the period, ‘shorter fiction’. Likewise in Anna Fancet’s essay on maternity in Walter Scott, Scotland’s most influential writer continues to be open to supple interpretation. Continuing a rich vein of gender criticism in the same area is Barbara Leonardi’s treatment of The Profligate Princess, not one of James Hogg’s better-known texts. Alexander Hay turns welcome attention to another work of considerable interest, if little read today, Hugh Miller’s The Cruise of the Betsey. Yet again, we have here illumination of the Romantic imagination in Scotland. If ‘Romantic’ is a rather broad term that requires all kind of qualification, we should perhaps embrace it for a while in the context of the early twenty-first century. One of the ludicrous knots into which twentieth-century Scottish criticism tied itself was in reaching the widely influential proposition/conclusion that Romanticism had passed the country by.

As with the medieval and renaissance periods, so too with a later ‘renaissance’, Scottish literature of the 1920s and 30s: SLR has not had all that many submissions in this area recently. For a time, perhaps especially in the 1980s, this period seemed to be the hub of as much, if not more, literary criticism as compared to that for any other milieu. In this issue, we have Juliet Shields on the early twentieth-century fiction of O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) and Claudia Rosenhan on Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door, one of the great ‘rediscovered’ texts from the 1920s in the 1980s. Perhaps critical attention is strongest at the moment on women’s writing in the twentieth-century literary renaissance, or maybe that should be ‘renascence’ in its usefully discriminated historical idiom. Labels of period are as difficult in Scottish literary studies as elsewhere, and critical fashion is much the same as elsewhere.

I have received approving feedback of recently run ‘book history’ pieces, and I include another in this issue: Craig Lamont and Patrick Scott’s careful detective work on the first Irish edition of Robert Burns.

Launch of Thomas Muir Collection

Thomas Muir of Huntershill: Essays for the Twenty-First century will be launched in the Kelvin Hall, Thursday 15 December @ 6:15 for 6:45, including short talks by Professor Sir Tom Devine and others. Light refreshments will be served. ADMISSION FREE but please book places at:

RobertBurnsStudies@glasgow.ac.uk

Muriel Spark Centenary: 2018

To commemorate the centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark (1918–2006) there will be a two-day symposium at the University of Glasgow (1 and 2 February 2018). This will be held in association with the National Library of Scotland. Submissions for 20-minute papers for the conference are welcome. Please provide an abstract (up to 200 words) by 28 February 2017...