Introduction to 'Smeddum'.pdf

The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon (ed. by Scott Lyall), 2015

This article focuses on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s staging of multiple personae both in his life and in his oeuvre. It deals with what is termed is here as a ‘heterodixical stance’ – a shifting perspective and a fragmentary method that chime with modernist techniques. It discusses a wide range of works, both fictional and non-fictional, canonical and less explored. Through such a radical re-reading the article also attempts to reframe Gibbon’s nationalism as ‘cosmopolitan’ and fluid.

British Assocation for Modernist Studies conference, London, June 2019.

Despite the field arguably being his most natural home, Lewis Grassic Gibbon is relatively little known within modernist studies, relegated instead to the implicitly devalued sub-categories of “working-class” or “socialist” writing (themselves often erroneously reduced to simple sub-categories of realism). The result, as Douglas McNeill explains, is that Gibbon remains ‘under-read, under-discussed, under-theorised’. Simultaneously, however, Gibbon also unsettles traditional categorisation within working-class literature: a crofter’s son from rural Scotland, he falls outside orthodox Marxist definitions of ‘proletarian’, resulting in his incorrect classification by some contemporaries as a ‘bourgeois intellectual’. Moreover, though a self-described ‘revolutionary writer’, Gibbon nonetheless decried the prescriptive anti-modernism of other socialist writers and intellectuals as ‘bolshevik blah’. Indeed, his most comprehensive critique of such ‘blah’ can arguably be read in the overt modernism of his trilogy, A Scots Quair (1932-34), wherein the aesthetic principles of early twentieth-century avant-gardists are fused with the political ambitions of the Marxist historical novel as his characters move from Scotland’s declining semi-feudal croft economy to the metropolitan centre commonly associated with both archetypal modernist and proletarian subjects. Gibbon’s aesthetic practice is thus fundamentally intertwined with his heterodox revolutionary outlook; in combining the two, he confirms his status as both a troublesome modernist and a troublesome proletarian, differentiating himself from the vast majority within the left-wing and avant-garde literary milieus to produce a text whose modernism centres working-class subjectivity and locates collective agency not in the orthodoxies of any single ideology or organisation but rather as a capacity latent within the class itself.

1981

The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 2015

What's wrong with the other moderns is the lack of purpose in their infernal books.' 1 This chapter reads Lewis Grassic Gibbon as a Modernist writer and in so doing provides a distinctive critical and historical framework for the understanding of key linguistic, stylistic and formal elements of his writing. 2 The first section of the chapter develops a reading of Gibbon's novels that focuses on their formal and stylistic relations to other Modernist writings, while arguing also that Gibbon's Modernism is inflected in quite specific ways by his distinctive sense of literary and historical purpose. This sense of purpose is related to the innovative ways that Gibbon seeks to embody the rhythms and patterns of history in his novels; to create a narrative voice that is both local in texture and epic in scope; and to explore how historical and political agency are imaginable in the modern world. Understanding the innovative quality of the formal and narrative strategies Gibbon develops to represent the energies and patterns of historical change requires firstly a consideration of the particular theories of history that shaped his literary writings, particularly those associated with the movement known as Diffusionism. But Gibbon's stylistic innovations are also considered in this chapter in relation to the work of some other modernist writers with a strong interest in history, in order to demonstrate the extent to which Gibbon can be understood both as part of but different from this broader literary Modernism.

The Irish Genealogist, 2023

Dear Sir -It shocked me to read in your columns the extracts from the book written by Skeffington Gibbons about the "Squires and Squireens of Roscommon 100 Years Ago". The writer of that book was reckless in throwing dirt on the graves of men long dead. The authors of the Skeffington Gibbons book are well known to be an unfrocked priest and a disgraced butler. Let the dead past bury its dead, and the work of these authors is unworthy of quotation. There are many men, some now in humble positions in life, who are still proud of these ancestors of theirs, which these papers insult. OLD ROSCOMMON The Roscommon Herald had informed its readers that the author of the objectionable articles "is usually supposed to be the pen name of one of the O'Conors of Belanagare, who wrote certain bitter and sarcastic things over a hundred years ago about his neighbours and friends in the Co. Roscommon", and concluded that "he was a kind of George Moore of his day". 1 After achieving a brief notoriety for The Recollections of Skeffington Gibbon, from 1796 to the Present Year, 1829, being an Epitome of the Lives and Characters of the Nobility and Gentry of Roscommon, the Genealogy of Those who are Descended from the Kings of Connaught; and a Memoir of the late Madame O'Conor Don, the writer sank back into obscurity, even his identity forgotten. 2 By 1892, Skeffington Gibbon was being glossed as a pen-name of "A. O'Kelly" (some supposed the A to be for Augustus). The above letter to the Roscommon Herald posited a pair of rackety authors, while the newspaper itself had another theory, and in 1935 The Irish Book Lover reported that "the writer of Skeffington Gibbon's Recollections was a Roscommon schoolmaster, one James O'Kelly who was a brother of Patrick O'Kelly, the author of The Eudoxologist, a poem (1812) in which he sings the praises of the gentry of the counties of Galway, Mayo and Roscommon". 3 Wikipedia today states that Skeffington Gibbon was a pseudonym, and that "no details in the book relating to his birth, childhood or ancestry have been independently proven". Some light may now be cast on aspects of his career from contemporary newspapers and a few surviving letters, which illuminate the context of his Recollections, and the workings of the Dublin book trade when the volume was published.

A review of Anthony Gidden's The Consequence of Modernity

"Gibbon's Memoirs: The Palimpsest as Paradigm for Autobiographies?." Anglistentag 1997 in Gießen: Proceedings. Eds. Borgmeier, Raimund; Grabes, Herbert; Jucker, Andreas H.. Trier: WvT. 463 - 476., 1998

A contribution to the Anglistentag 1997 in Gießen, Germany: Proceedings.

Orbis Litterarum, 1994

Gibbon’s first publication, the Essai sur l’etude de la litterature, betrayed a certain “quality of foreignness,” as Gibbon noted himself. The Essai was written in the context of the controversy, in France, between philosophes and erudits, a controversy Gibbon was familiar with because of the formative years he had spent in frenchified Lausanne. In England, where the Essai was published, the satirical climate was quite different. In order to succeed, Gib bon’s Essai would need a sympathetic introduction, but Matthieu Maty’s A I’Auteur fails to provide one. If anything, it brings Gibbon’s foreignness into sharper focus, and could be of no help to Gibbon in shaking off his cultural melancholy. Gibbon’s sense of cultural homelessness has disappeared by the time he writes the Memoirs of my Life. Resettled in Lausanne, Gibbon remembers much of his life against the background of his “quality of foreign ness,” and the memories of his Essai particularly give us a good view of his struggles with a reluctant Englishness. Ultimately, however, it would appear that the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could choose neither Paris nor London for his cultural centre.

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2019

Edward Gibbon's (1737-1794) library was fundamental to his historical work and he could not have written his great history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1778) without it. His library continues to attract interest and attention, and two documents held in Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library and Archives, not previously known to scholars, provide new information about the books that Gibbon owned. These are an invoice from his London bookbinder, Joseph Hall, for 1773-1776, and an invoice from his Lausanne bookseller, Jules Henri Pott, for 1793. The article provides transcriptions of these two documents, examines their contents, and discusses their importance for our understanding of Gibbon's library. Résumé La bibliothèque d'Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) a joué un rôle fondamental dans son travail historique, et il n'aurait pu rédiger sans elle sa riche histoire The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1778) (Histoire de la décadence et de la chute de l'Empire romain : traduction de l'anglais publiée en 1819). Sa bibliothèque continue de susciter l'intérêt et l'attention, et deux documents conservés à la Division des livres rares et collections spécialisées, Bibliothèque et Archives de l'Université McGill, auparavant inconnus des chercheursboursiers, fournit de nouvelles informations sur les livres que possédait * An earlier version of this paper, entitled "The Library of Edward Gibbon and Bibliographical Research in the 21 st Century," was presented at the 38 e journée d'échanges scientifiques de l'Association Québécoise pour l'étude de l'imprimé, 29 October 2010. Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, has graciously given permission for the publication of the two documents in this article. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 56/1-2 54 Gibbon. Il s'agit d'une facture de son relieur à London, Joseph Hall, pour la période 1773-1776, et d'une facture de son libraire à Lausanne, Jules Henri Pott, pour l'année 1793. L'article présente une transcription de ces deux documents, examine leur contenu et discute de leur importance pour notre compréhension de la bibliothèque de Gibbon.