‘To Have Kissed a St Kilda Lassie’

Tekstualia

The essay proposes an exploratory discussion of the signifi cance of the the concept of islands and archipelagos in Scottish poetry. Beginning with a look at Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775) and James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), the essay recalibrates the notion of remoteness, thus attempting to challenge dominant narratives of the centre and its margins. With an overview of selected poetic representations of the islands of Scotland, the paper aims to offer an insight into the diversity of voices and approaches characterizing Scottish literature, with a brief look at the twentieth-century and twenty-fi rst century Scottish poetry including readings of selected works of such poetic fi gures as Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Don Paterson.

2018

Hugh MacDiarmid's 'The Stone Called Saxagonus', first published in his travel guide-cum-polemic-cum-potboiler The Islands of Scotland (1939), is blunt in its response to the Celtic Twilight: 'Mrs. Kennedy-Fraser's Hebridean songs-the whole / Celtic Twilight business-I abhor'. 1 This abhorrence is no surprise. By the 1930s, as John Kerrigan has pointed out, '[r]ejecting the Celtic Twilight was almost a convention in itself', and the terms of the rejection were also 'conventional'. 2 Common targets were the perceived sentimentality, imprecision and intellectual softness of the genre, or its hackneyed presentation of 'the pathetic fallacy or the figure of the lone wanderer', or its inauthenticity. 3 The immediate point of comparison for MacDiarmid is Debussy's 'impression of Greig'-'the delightful taste of a pink sweet filled with snow'-which is far from the (desirable) 'hardy intellectual virility' of Ibsen. 4 Similarly, Sorley MacLean, in his 1938 essay 'Realism in Gaelic Poetry', contrasts Twilight poetry with the 'realist qualities' of 'hardness and clarity and firmness of outline' that he sees in all (true) Celtic poetry with the 'vague, misty, cloudy romanticism' of Celtic Twilight poetry that was, borrowing a phrase from T.E. Hulme, 'fozy with infinity'. 5 For MacDiarmid and MacLean the question is one of inauthentic sentimentality (limp vagueness rather than limpid 'virility'). But for MacLean it is 1 Hugh MacDiarmid, The Islands of Scotland (London: Batsford, 1939), pp. xiv-xv. Marjory Kennedy-Fraser gathered-between 1909 and 1925-three volumes of Songs of the Hebrides (and a fourth entitled From the Hebrides).

1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 2024

1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 29 (2024)

2006

Scottish Literary Review 2.2 (2010): 216-217.

In Scotland you can reach Guyana by taking the A81 north from Glasgow, or the A84 then A81 from the Crianlarich turnoff on the M80 Motorway at Stirling. Either way you'll find Guyana -a garden centre in Aberfoyle, specialising in plants, garden arts and crafts sourced from around the world.

2006

The processes of geographical change here explained are apparent, for the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century respectively, in the 'Old' and New statistical accounts of Scotland, works which amount to national geographical self-portraits. Both are part, however, of a longer-run tradition of geographical enquiry in Scotland. Geographical descriptions of the nation, only partially or never realised, were undertaken in 1708, 1721-44, 1757 and 1781. The particular mapping project that was the Military Survey of Scotland (1747-54), an exercise in political control after Culloden, was followed by the work of estate surveyors and, in turn, by maps and plans of farms and new policies as the rhetoric of Improvement became inscribed on the land. In the cities especially, a new type of Scot emerged, the self-styled 'private teacher of geography': men like Robert Darling, who, in Edinburgh's Ramsay's Land in 1776 and again in 1793-4, 'teacheth Youth Writing, Book-keeping, Mathematics and geography, and Gentlemen to Measure and Plan their own estates'. Ebenezer MacFait, another such in late Enlightenment Edinburgh, taught geography to Walter Scott. Robert Burns took what he termed 'My knowledge of ancient story' from geography books, including the Brechin-born William Guthrie's Geographical Grammar, first published in 1770. Geography was taught in the universities: by mathematicians like Colin MacLaurin, by natural philosophers like Thomas Reid and by natural historians like Robert Jameson. If, then, we can locate geography in the Scottish Enlightenment, it is also possible to see the Enlightenment as both concerned with matters of geography-with the cultural status of the Highlands, with potato yields and with soil chemistry, for example-and itself geographically different. In Glasgow, for example, the Enlightenment had its own distinctive character based on the city's industrial and American-oriented commercial growth, the dynamism of the evangelicals and the status of the merchant classes. In Aberdeen, by contrast, the Enlightenment was distinguished by the town's European outlook, apparent both in philosophical concerns and in the town's trading links, by explicit interests in rhetoric and the Scots language and by the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and his circle. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scotland's geographical self-awareness was furthered by the work of formal survey projects: the Ordnance Survey with its hesitant beginnings in Scotland in 1809; the Geological Survey of the northwest Highlands between 1883 and 1907; the British-wide Linguistic and Ethnological Surveys of the 1880s and 1892-9 respectively, and the 1907 Pigmentation Survey, which aimed to document the racial make-up of the nation by measuring head shape and skin colour. Individual Scots at home and overseas likewise promoted the geographical sciences as a contribution to Empire: John Murray on HMS Challenger, W. S. Bruce on the Scotia in the 1902-4 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, and, from his Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, Patrick Geddes emphasised geography as a means to local knowledge, national understanding and global citizenship.

This dissertation looks at five Scottish writers who toured the Highlands in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and recorded their impressions in prose and/or verse. An attempt is made to place them in either of the two established ways of approaching the Highlands between 1770 and 1830. The earlier one of these approaches, the 'philosophical' or Johnsonian tour, is predominantly learned or scientific, and its objects are the 'savage' inhabitants of the Highlands, their culture and ways of life. This is what preoccupies James Boswell, who toured the Highlands in 1773 with Dr.

2001

The Invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century" examines the limited place in the canon traditionally allowed to creative writing in Scotland during this period and the overarching reading of creative impediment applied to it in the light of Scotland's fraught and not easily to be homogenised national history and identity. It interrogates the dominant mode of what it terms the Scottish literary critical tradition and finds this tradition to have many shortcomings as a result of its prioritising of literary and cultural holism. In examining the Scots poetry revival of the eighteenth century the thesis challenges the traditional identification of a populist and beset mode, and finds eighteenth-century poetry in Scots to be actually much more catholic in its literary connections. These more catholic "British" connections are reappraised alongside the distinctively Scottish accents of the poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. The poetry of James Thomson, it is also argued, fits more easily into a heterogeneous Scottish identity than is sometimes thought and the work of Thomson is connected with the poets in Scots to show a network of influence and allegiance which is more coherent than has been traditionally allowed. Similarly, the primitivist agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment in creative literature is examined to demonstrate the way in which this provides license for reclaiming elements of the historically fraught or "backward" Scottish identity (thus an essentially conservative, patriotic element within the Scottish Enlightenment cultural voice is emphasised). Also, with the writers of poetry in Scots, as well as with Thomson, and with those whose work comes under the intellectual sponsorship of Enlightenment primitivism such as Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson, James Beattie and others we chart a movement from the age of Augustanism and neoclassicism to that of sensibility and proto-Romanticism. From Bums's work to that of Walter Scott, John Galt and James Hogg we highlight Scottish writers making creative capital from the difficult and fractured Scottish identity and seeing this identity as, in part, reflecting cultural tensions and fractures which are more widely coined furth of their own country. The connecting threads of the thesis are those narratives in Scottish literature of the period which show the retrieval and analysis of seemingly lost or receding elements of Scottish identity. Creative innovation and re-energisation rather than surrender and loss are what the thesis finally diagnoses in Scottish literature of the long eighteenth century. Contents. Introduction. pp. 1-4. Chapter One. The Modern Making of the Scottish Literary Canon and the Problem of the Long Eighteenth Century pp. 5-47. Chapter Two. "Fashion of Words and Wit may Change, /And Rob in part their fame ": Allan Ramsay and the Formation of Poetry in Scots in the Early Eighteenth Century pp. 48-89. Chapter Three. "My trembling muse your honour does address/That its a bold attempt most humbly I confess ": James Thomson and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literary Identity pp. 90-119. Chapter Four. " 'Mang men, wae's-heart! we aft en find/The brawest dress want peace of mind ": Robert Fergusson and High Scots Cultural Complaint pp. 120-164. Chapter Five. "Rugged her soil, and rugged was her shore, /yet she gained a name/That stands unrivall'd in the rolls of fame ": The Anti-Canon of the Scottish Enlightenment pp. 165-220. Chapter Six. Robert Burns: "Doing honour to our language, our nation and our species. " pp. 221-276. Chapter Seven. "Circumstances which the Author has not been able to persuade himself to retract or cancel ": The Scottish Novel in the Early Nineteenth Century pp. 277-319. Conclusion. pp. 320-322. Bibliography. pp. 323-337. ' An earlier version of a small part of the material in this chapter appeared as "The Construction of the Scottish Critical Tradition" in Neil McMillan and Kirsten Stirling (eds), Odd Alliances (Glasgow, 1999), pp. 52-65.

2016

Presidential Address given to the Boswell Society, Auchinleck House, October 2016