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Allan Ramsay was central to all aspects of Scottish literary culture in the eighteenth century, working simultaneously in editing, playwriting, theatre management, song collecting and bookselling, as well as founding and directing Britain's first circulating library. It was, however, his own original work as a poet which had a transformative influence on the way in which Scottish literature would develop in the ensuing decades and, indeed, centuries. Emerging as a published author in the early 1710s, Ramsay built a remarkably prominent profile as a poet of the Scots language whose work appealed to a diverse range of readers, allowing him to produce prestigious subscribers' editions of his poems in 1721 and 1728 and to continue as a poet until his death in 1758. This definitive and ground-breaking edition of Ramsay's poems reflects the fifty-year career of an influential cultural and literary innovator, which will open new avenues for research.
The 1820s has commonly been overlooked in literary and cultural studies, seen as a barren interregnum between the achievements of Romanticism and the Victorian era proper, or, at best, as a time of transition bridging two major periods of cultural production. This volume contends that the innovations, fears and experiments of the 1820s are both of considerable interest in themselves and vital for comprehending how Victorian and Romantic culture wrote and visioned one another into being. Remediating the 1820s explores the decade's own sense of itself as a period of expansion in terms of the projection of British power and knowledge, but also its tremendous uncertainty about where this left traditional identities and moral values. In doing so, the collection articulates how specific novelties, transformations and anxieties of the time remediated and remade culture and society in manners that continue powerfully to resonate.
Key Concepts in Victorian Studies is a comprehensive and accessible resource for students of the long nineteenth century. The volume is divided into a number of cross-referenced sections which address the preoccupations and historical events of this crucial period in recent history and culture. Central to the book's function as a durable reference work is an extensive A-Z glossary which clarifies Victorian terminology and explains key historical and political events. This is supplemented with a chronology listing significant domestic, imperial and international events from 1837 to 1901; a tabulation of British Prime Ministers in office during Queen Victoria's reign; a succinct but detailed survey of the most important acts of Parliament in the period; an explanation of pre-decimal British coinage; and a useful chart which converts imperial measurement into their metric equivalents. This book is an essential reference for scholars of Victorian literature and history from undergraduate to postgraduate level.
This exciting volume is the first scholarly edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Includes the only current textual apparatus collated from different iterations of the stories along with a detailed introduction and an essay on the text based on contemporary scholarship.
Instead of treating modernism principally as a thing of the past, this volume highlights modernism as an impulse that can be carried forward to the present, re-embodied and re-encountered in theatrical performance. It demonstrates how modernist impulses spark contemporary theatre in electric and dynamic ways, continuing the modernist imperative to 'make it new' and to engage meaningfully with the complicated situation of living in the contemporary world. Through a diverse set of contributions from scholars and theatre practitioners, this book examines the legacy of modernism on the world stage in acts of remembrance, restaging, transmission and slippage. It investigates both well-known and less familiar aspects of modernist theatre history, engaging topics such as the revival of the first Black American musical, feminist and disability-led reinterpretations of canonical modernist plays, the use of modernist-inspired performance practice in contemporary university arts education and the continually contested meaning and importance of the avant-garde.
A definitive account of newspaper and periodical press history across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales covering 1650 to the present day.
At various points over the last 400 years, key political, economic and social processes, have worked to hinder or promote the expansion and dissemination of information across Britain and Ireland via newspapers and periodicals. In a contemporary era characterized by debate on the limits of devolution and the potential of independence we need to assess the roles played by newspapers and periodicals in enabling national and regional identities to emerge, cohere and diversify over time. How can we best identify the most significant of these processes? What were the critical flashpoints in their development? How have they marked the place of the press in civic society? What are the consequences in considering these within the general history of the British and Irish press? This three-volume prestige project addresses these matters, offering a definitive account of newspaper and periodical press activity across Britain and Ireland between 1650 to the present day and addressing questions related to four key research interests: general social/ political history; newspaper and periodical history; cultural history; and technological history.
In Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819) the young John Gibson Lockhart (under the guise of an elderly Welsh physician) portrayed and analysed the society of Regency Glasgow and Edinburgh in terms of German nationalist and Romantic criticism. Focusing on the networks of the law, the church, the universities, fine art, antiquarianism, literature, theatre, and periodical culture he provided a series of brilliant, sometimes serious and sometimes satirical, portraits of the most notable characters of the day and the institutions they represented, and his text is accompanied by a series of portrait engravings and of vignettes of significant moments in his tour. This edition presents the first complete text of this widely-allusive work published since 1819, together with the substantial notes that a modern reader requires to understand it fully. The editorial apparatus also comprises a detailed index and an essay on the contemporary illustrations.
The History of Matthew Wald (1824) is John Gibson Lockhart's fourth and final novel and perhaps his most focused, stylistically successful fiction. The title character tells his own story, which is set in the context of, and carefully interwoven with, the larger historical, social, and political events and circumstances of Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Matthew Wald exemplifies Lockhart's idea that the novel should portray the 'human mind under the influence of not one, but many of its passions-ambition-love-revenge-remorse' and should reflect the historical and social truth of the age. This scholarly edition includes an Introduction that discusses the literary and historical contexts of the narrative and the novel's early reception and textual history. Detailed Explanatory Notes complement the Introduction to provide the modern reader with the resources to re-evaluate Lockhart's place in the history of the Scottish novel and Romantic fiction.
Much Persian sufi literature is explicitly didactic, aiming to instruct its readers and motivate pious reform. Moving beyond a recapitulation of religious content, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction investigates the performative function of didactic poetry for mystical audiences, focusing in particular on the verse of Farid al-Din ʿAttar, a central figure of the tradition best known for long narrative poems imbued with edifying sufi themes. Through a series of sensitive and creative readings, O'Malley shows how ʿAttar uses frame-tales, metapoetic commentary and allegories to think through his relationship with his readers, imagine and guide their reactions to his work and perform his instructive authority. By teasing out this implicit, recipient-centred poetics, O'Malley recovers sufi didacticism's participatory, interactive character and shows how the act of reading was invested with ritual significance as a spiritual exercise aimed at the purification of the soul.
We share with Shakespeare, it seems, the assumption that to be human is to be an interpreter of oneself, others and the world - seeking but not always arriving at understanding. Shakespeare, the Reformation and the Interpreting Self explores this perspective on human subjectivity. This study reads the complex, compelling representations of the self as an interpreter (and misinterpreter) of reality in Shakespeare's 'problem plays' alongside an intellectual history that links the culture-shaping theological hermeneutics of the playwright's day to the similarly influential philosophical hermeneutics of our times. What is it to be an interpreting self? This book's critical approach brings to the fore questions about the self's finitude, agency, motivations, self-knowledge and ethical relation to others, questions that were of great relevance in Shakespeare's England and which continue to resonate in our present-day dilemmas and debates about human experience and human being.
This is a scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's controversial collection of medical tales, first published in 1894 in the first flush of his fame. Conan Doyle had trained in medicine at Edinburgh University in the 1870s, and then spent eight years as a General Practitioner in Southsea, before deciding to become a professional author in 1890. The stories he collected in Round the Red Lamp are gathered from his medical training and incidents in his life as a provincial GP. Some of the stories are daring - dealing explicitly with child birth, sexually transmitted diseases and malpractice. Some are sentimental or comic vignettes. Some are Gothic horrors. On publication the shades of dark and light bewildered some of his readers and the medical realism outraged others. Round the Red Lamp is a vital collection in understanding Conan Doyle's shift of profession from medic to author.
During Katherine Mansfield's life she experienced the effects of abortion, miscarriage, gonorrhoea, peritonitis, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and would take up a peripatetic existence constantly in search of more favourable climates. The First World War of 1914-1918 and the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 informed the zeitgeist of her times. This volume of essays explores the extent to which this resonant context of disease and death shaped Mansfield's literary output and her modes of thinking. Illness both stimulated and limited Mansfield's creativity - she would write to fund her medical care while simultaneously limited by her poor health, writing in 1922: 'The real point is I shall have to make as much money as I can on my next book - my path is so dotted with doctors'. As explored in this volume, her personal writings document the increasing influence of tubercular literary predecessors such as Anton Chekhov and John Keats, while her stories function compellingly as dialogue with loved ones who have been lost - her brother, her mother, her grandmother - endowing them with life in the process.
In Lawrie Todd (1830; revised edition 1832), John Galt paints an optimistic portrait of Scottish emigration to North America. Designed as a fictional autobiography, the novel charts the fortunes of its protagonist from his departure from Scotland - to avoid being tried for treason over his French Revolutionary sympathies - to his rise to prosperity as a shopkeeper in New York City and imaginary towns near Rochester. This edition of the novel provides a contextual introduction, explanatory notes, and maps that connect Todd's life story with boom times in New York and with Galt's own efforts at social entrepreneurship in Canada as well as with debates over emigration and political reforms in Britain. It sheds light on Galt's methods of characterisation, including his use of Scots and 'Yankee' speech habits and adaptation of real-life models, and on his popularity with readers in his own time.
Part of a two-volume set, this volume examines the issues of commitment and hybridization in Arabic literature concentrating on Palestinian literature and Arab-Jewish culture and the interactions between them. Reuvin Snir studies the contribution of Palestinian literature and theatre to Palestinian nation-building, especially since the 1948 Nakba. Becoming an essential part of the vocabulary of Arab intellectuals and writers, since the 1950s commitment (iltizām) has been employed to indicate the necessity for a writer to convey a message rather than merely create an imaginative work for its own sake. As for hybridization, the author focuses on the role Jews have played in Arabic literature against the backdrop of their contribution to this literature since the pre-Islamic period, and in light of the gradual demise of Arab-Jewish culture in recent years. The blending of elements from different cultures is one of the major phenomena in Arabic literature, certainly in light of its relationship with Islam and its cultural heritage, which has been extending during the last one-and-half millennia.
Often, the story of encounters between Asia and the West has been told as one of success, of cross-fertilization, reciprocal stimulation and an exchange of commodities and knowledge. Yet, the history of East-West encounters is riddled with prominent examples of misunderstandings, ignorance, unrealistic expectations or unbridgeable cultural differences. Bringing together scholars working across Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, English Studies and French Studies, this book presents new perspectives on such instances by theorizing epistemologies of failure. Providing examples from different periods and disciplines, it reveals how culturally informed expectations and biases, performative and linguistic practices and imaginative horizons specific to the cultures involved shape notions of failure and success. Case studies range from first encounters in the early modern period to contemporary novels and focus on actual or imaginary encounters between East Asia and Western European cultures.
Robert Burns is Scotland's best known and most influential poet; yet his political legacy also ranks amongst the most contentious. His ambiguous verse, oscillating between patriotic odes, egalitarian lines and royalist songs, lends itself to interpretations from across the political divide.
Blending political history and literary studies, this book explores this contested legacy of 'Scotland's National Bard'. It follows the transformations of Burns's image throughout the late modern era, as revolutionaries, nationalists and avant-garde writers co-opted Burns's myth to subvert their country's social and constitutional order. From Great War unionism to 1940s socialism and contemporary nationalism, the examination of Burns's tempestuous afterlives sheds light on the ongoing Scottish question. Overall, it reminds us that poetry is a very shifting ground on which to build a national identity.
This collection of essays provides a thorough and probing account of an author who is quickly becoming one of the most read, studied and taught contemporary writers, but whose work remains underrepresented in scholarship. It is broad and ambitious in scope, mirroring the richness of Ward's oeuvre, and it brings together a diverse and dynamic range of approaches that reflect the scholarly conversations in which Ward is embedded.
Since around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.
Who were the pioneers who first thought of radio as an art form, who debated how to write and perform for radio, who discussed radio's social and political dimensions? Spanning from 1924 to 1938, this anthology brings together long-forgotten texts on sound, listening and writing by radio enthusiasts, journalists, actors, radio producers and literary authors who conceptualised the new radio aesthetic between the two world wars and reflected on radio's future, as a medium requiring the invention of a new literature, new modes of performance and new ways of listening. The texts included here, drawn from British, French, German and Italian radio cultures, are representative of important pan-European debates about radio's potential at a critical moment in its history. Together, they shed light on ideas that shaped not only the emergence of radio drama, sound art and reportage, but radio as we know it today.
Derick Thomson was one of the most influential personalities of Gaelic Scotland in the twentieth century. His poetry counts among the best written in the language; he founded the most important modern Gaelic journal, Gairm, and was the force behind many ventures aimed at the preservation and development of Gaelic. He made major contributions to Gaelic studies as an academic subject and his publications are still indispensable to all working in the field. Thomson's vision of the Gaelic revival is characterised by high standards, organisational and economic shrewdness, openness to second-language users, and broad European outlook.
This is the very first book-length study devoted to Thomson and it explores his career within the context of the history of the Gaelic revival in Scotland and other minority-language movements in Europe.