Florence Dixie

Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 2006

‘True Biographies of Nations?’: The Cultural Journeys of Dictionaries of National Biography, 2019

2007

Scottish Studies, 2018

In 1821, while on a summer visit to Rossie in Fife, seven-year-old Cecilia Margaret Douglas wrote home to her mother in Edinburgh describing a recent 'play day'. She named among the players a special nurse: 'Jeany Durie was also of the party[;] she is quite well and quite as pleasant as she was last year.' 1 This, with a few other lines from a later letter from Cecilia to her mother, provide the only written testimony yet found for the genesis of a family storytelling tradition spanning at least 150 years. Jeanie 2 was a riveting storyteller and a special figure for Cecilia, who listened well in her girlhood and then retold the nurse's tales long into life, sharing them with a young niece, Jemima Bannerman. Jemima, as impressed by 'Aunt Ceil's' tellings as Ceil had been by Nurse Durie's, fixed them in memory and finally wrote them down as an adult. Jemima then read the tales to her own niece, Kathleen Mary Turing Bannerman. In 1968, when Kathleen Bannerman, then in her seventies 3 , presented a typescript collection of five tales to the School of Scottish Studies, she was passing on a female storytelling tradition shared over four generations. Because the name of Jeanie Durie appears nowhere in the typescript, it is a tribute to the bonds formed between Jeanie and Ceil, Ceil and Jemima, and Jemima and Kathleen-and to the power of their collective love of story-that we know it today. The 'Bannerman Manuscript', as this tale cache has come to be known, appears a modest vessel for broad speculation, yet its twenty-one typed pages are unique in ways that bear close attention. Slight as these tales are, they witness a long, unbroken tradition of female

BABEL AFIAL , 2017

Although representations of woman as nation have been traditionally related to nationalist movements which emphasise women’s symbolic role, they are sometimes contradictory, and thus, difficult to categorise. This essay introduces the main concerns of the Scottish Literary Renaissance and focuses on the representation of woman as nation during this period, in Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song. It will be contended that MacDiarmid’s female characters seem to adapt to the traditional characterisation of woman as nation figures while Grassic Gibbon infuses his female characters with a psychological depth that prevents them from fully conforming to a national allegorical reading. Therefore, this essay will argue that this ambivalence, which partly results from the cultural and linguistic hybridity of Scotland, problematizes the existence of a coherent tradition of woman as nation in the Scottish context.

Celebrations of Scottish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century have neglected one of Scotland’s most important writers: Agnes Owens. Owens’ work and its influence is far more complex, and far greater in reach, than most accounts acknowledge. Her significance is no secret: Alasdair Gray and James Kelman have championed her work; Glasgow University’s Douglas Gifford has said that Owens “can claim to have done more than most in the redefinition of women in fiction.” This paper aims to lay the groundwork from which meaningful criticism of Agnes Owens can be realised in the 21st Century. Taking cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, particularly his argument that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense”, I argue that the aesthetics and politics of Owens’ work deconstruct and redefine traditional models of working-class literature and representation. The first chapter analyses her fi...

The figure of the old woman is prevalent in Scottish consciousness and literature, from popular nursery rhymes, like the famous “grannie” in the Scots rhyme “Ye cannae shove yer grannie aff the bus”, to folktales, and numerous acclaimed works of literature. While the humorous rhyme might seem quite trivial, simply reinstating the social expectation to respect elders, the figure of the old woman is far from only present in popular rhymes, as it permeates Scottish literature. In the Gaelic tradition, the figure of the Cailleach meaning old woman or hag in modern Scottish Gaelic has been present in literature since the early Irish period, in poems like the “Lament of the Old Woman of Beare”, where she laments her old age and the passing of time. In Gaelic folklore, the Cailleach is believed to be a divine old woman, with a strong link to nature and winter – a legacy to be seen in place-names throughout the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Strongly linked to the land, she is a creation deity, referred to as a “creator and presider over landscape” by Ó Crualaoich (1994: 151), and is even deemed by some to be the “woman that created Scotland”. This strong link between the old woman and the land of Scotland in a literary (and popular) tradition allows us wonder how much the figure of the old woman relates to a national narrative in Scotland, especially in the literature of the twentieth century, marked by the Scottish Renaissance, and the resurgence of Scottish nationalism. This thesis focuses on three novels, Witch Wood by John Buchan, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark and Consider the Lilies, by Iain Crichton Smith.

2013