Reiko Aiura-Vigers (Shiga University of Medical Science)
George MacDonald's Lilith in the Context of Other Myths
Although George MacDonald’s time came a little earlier than that of Jessie Weston, and they were known for rather different cultural interests, there seem to be some interesting correlations between their works. He was born in 1824, near Huntly in Aberdeenshire, and died in 1905, whereas she was born in 1850, was published from 1896 to 1920, and died in 1928.
George MacDonald was known for his theology, his social novels, and his children’s stories, whereas Jessie Weston became known as a folklorist, and a student of anthropology and of Arthurian literature. MacDonald was a "myth-maker", a creator of stories, and Weston an explorer of myths.
It is also widely known that Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance influenced Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is also known as a poem based on Arthurian legends.
In this paper, I should like to concentrate on Celtic themes such as water, as they are important in many of the works of both MacDonald and Weston.
Richard Arnold (University of Lethbridge)
The World’s Most Controversial Hymn-Book: Thomas Toke Lynch and The Rivulet of 1855
The English hymn had an extremely controversial history for more than 200 years from its first appearance, so much so that it was not legal in Church of England services until later in the 19th century, the equivocal "permission" or ambiguous "tolerance" coming 40 years after a civil/ecclesiastical lawsuit by parishioners against their own pastor at St. Paul’s, Sheffield (Case: Holy & Ward vs. Cotterill; referred to Consistory Court of York, 1819; settlement without binding ruling 1859).
The debates were complex, effervescent, and multi-faceted, but in essence there were three central issues: political, social, and literary/liturgical. Politically, the Church of England service was by statute "uniform and authorized throughout the realm" (Act of Uniformity, 1549), changeable only "by Act of Parliament"; and the only "Sung or repeated" portions thereof – by congregations together – were the authorized Metrical Psalms: the 150 Biblical Psalms set – by Royal Commission (1562; revised 1696) – to music. If hymns "of meer Human Composure" (songs of praise written by modern human beings) were used, then diverse visions and doctrines and ideas would contaminate the service and ideology, thus allegedly contributing to further dissent and even sedition. Socially, despite all the official prohibitions and paranoia, hymns attracted unprecedented numbers of followers and enthusiasts: "for every one person who has been seduced from the Church by preaching, 10 have been seduced by hymns and their music" (1787); hymns were seen as dangerous and anarchic. In literary/liturgical terms, "Man’s poetry is exalted above the Holy Ghost?" – "Why are the poetic words of Man’s genius preferred to the Biblical words of God?" (1800). All these fears and prohibitions were rampant even though hymns were based on the Bible and commonly-shared Christian experience.
Then in 1855 the poet and Reverend Thomas Toke Lynch publishes The Rivulet: A Contribution to Sacred Song, in which he dares to write hymns (for congregational use) stemming from his own religious/poetic visions, not necessarily or identifiably based on the Bible or typical Christian doctrines, but based on nature and the human imagination – though highly fervent and spiritual. This book, though a small regional publication, caused "one of the most bitter controversies known in the annals of the modern Church" (1892): it generated hundreds of articles and pamphlets, and in essence changed the direction of hymnody forever, laying the literary groundwork for modern and even postmodern hymnody.
My paper will explore the significance of this regional publication with its national repercussions, as well as the debate that surrounded it, a debate which is itself significant for exploring at some depth three phenomena: the distinction or boundary-line between hymn and poem (when and/or how does a church song become literature?); the objectives and parameters of "reviewing" (what should reviewers of books aim to do? and what are they entitled or not entitled to say or focus on?); and the "ethics of quotation" (when and how is the act of quoting the work of someone else legitimate or illegitimate?); Lynch’s last major work was in fact titled The Ethics of Quotation. Thomas Toke Lynch’s The Rivulet, though small and regional in origin and intent, overflowed more in the manner of a mighty river, throughout England and beyond his own century.
Winnifred M. Bogaards (University of New Brunswick)
The Miramichi Novels of David Adams Richards: The Canadian Maritimes as a State of Mind
Born and raised on the Canadian prairies, I was struck immediately by the very different states of mind prevailing in that Western region and the Maritimes to which I moved in 1971. Despite a "boom or bust" economy and countless crop-destroying natural disasters, the prairies were proudly Canadian. By contrast, half the guests at the first Canada Day party I attended in Saint John, New Brunswick, wore black armbands to mourn the province’s entry into a confederation they believed had destroyed its prosperity by shifting wealth and power to the country’s centre, serviced by the St. Lawrence seaway, leaving the region mired in over a hundred years of economic depression. Most Westerners paid little attention and attached little value to their short past, focussing their attention instead on a future they optimistically believed could be "new and improved" by their own efforts; if unsatisfied with existing political parties, Westerners created new ones (CCF, Social Credit, Reform). In a region settled since the 18th century, Maritimers had a sufficiently strong sense of history that they continued to support the political parties of Confederation, even though their history told little that was cheering. Change was the norm in the West as people constantly moved, assuming the pot of gold could be found elsewhere, and waves of new immigrants from the four corners of the earth regularly forced the society to restructure; in such circumstances, there was no established social hierarchy and the self-made man who illustrated the sod shack to affluence myth was most admired. In the Maritimes, although almost a quarter of the population had been forced in this century to leave the region to find work, those who remained were deeply rooted in communities with long-established hierarchies and strongly resistant to change both because they were suspicious of anything new and because they lacked any hope that change could bring anything better. Few immigrants had come to the region in this century to alter the original uneasy mix of Acadian French and settlers from the United Kingdom imposed on the native population.
My arrival in the Maritimes coincided with the emergence of David Adams Richards as a novelist who would devote the next twenty-five years to the depiction, in seven novels, of his native Miramichi region of New Brunswick. Those novels are written from and describe a distinctly Maritime "state of mind". Although many of his characters are forced to move to other parts of Canada, those who remain are either disconnected from the country or aware of it as a negative force in Maritime lives, past and present. Blood ties and class consciousness are both strong in this river community. The prevailing state of mind is hopelessness, frustration and despair. Richards chooses to concentrate on the depiction and defense, not of the happy and successful, but on the pathos or tragedy of the drunken, violent, promiscuous, inarticulate and uneducated living in a particularly depressed part of a poor province in a marginalized region. He demands that attention must be paid to these people in this place whom everyone would like to forget because they do not conform to the advertisements for Canada as a land of opportunity or New Brunswick as the "picture province". He writes about the wounded and for those who hunt the wounded down. In the hunter category are many of the dispossessed themselves, the comfortable middle class and almost all the political, educational, religious or social institutions of a welfare state designed to help them.
Dietmar Böhnke (University of Leipzig)
Science Fiction and/or Scottish Fiction? The Ambiguous "SF" of Alasdair Gray in the Context of the "Two Cultures" Debate
In this paper I intend to focus on several "intertextualities" in what I call the science fiction writing of Alasdair Gray.
There is, first of all, the general question of the interrelatedness of the discourses of science and literature, which has been the object of debate among writers, scientists, sociologists, historians and philosophers for a considerable length of time, but especially since C. P. Snow’s controversial Rede Lecture of 1959, "The Two Cultures". Views and opinions on this matter are far from unanimous, and the discussion continues to this day, e. g. in research fields such as Literature & Science or in broader philosophical debates on truth in science or on constructivism in science, literature and culture generally. As the term itself implies, science fiction should be ideally suited for investigation in this context.
By way of example, I shall look at Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992) for ways in which science fiction writing can engage in and contribute to the above-mentioned controversy. Aspects that will be investigated include: firstly, Gray’s conscious place in a tradition of science fiction, exemplified in the novel by constant echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Secondly, (medical) science figures as a theme, raising questions about its moral and ethical responsibilities. Moreover, constructivism is an implied topic of the novel, to be extracted from Gray’s use of different, competing discourses which tell or comment on the story from different viewpoints, thus producing their own multiple intertextualities. Following approaches that have been taken in the field of Literature & Science one could even go as far as to attempt a reading of Poor Things in the light of chaos theory, arguing that each of the competing presentations of the story establishes a local order, whereas together they leave the reader with global disorder.
Finally, the question will be asked how these "intertextual" aspects of Gray’s science fiction writing correlate with the discourse of Scottish national identity, a topic that is arguably one of Gray’s priorities. Here, I shall mainly refer to his novels Poor Things and A History Maker (1994). The fin-de-siècle scientific background to the story in Poor Things, for example, can be seen as part of Gray’s project of "imagining" Glasgow (and Scotland). In A History Maker, the future society that Gray imagines is very much an embodiment of values of Scottish communalism, while at the same time the book makes fun of a superficial Scots-words or place-names approach to Scottish national identity. It seems that the science fiction genre, possibly by virtue of its engagement in broader debates of contemporary Western society and culture, particularly lends itself to Gray’s concern with politics in general and Scottish national identity in particular. Thus, for Alasdair Gray, the abbreviation SF reads Scottish Fiction as well as Science Fiction.
Aileen Christianson (University of Edinburgh)
Elspeth Barker, Candia McWilliam and Muriel Spark, Writers in Exile
This paper will consider Elspeth Barker, Candia McWilliam and Muriel Spark as writers in exile whose writing is nonetheless underpinned by allusive Scottishness. It will concentrate on McWilliam’s two most recent novels, A Little Stranger (1989) and Debatable Land (1994). In A Little Stranger, the narrator, cocooned like the growing foetus in her womb in the separateness of her pregnant state, is aware of the ambiguities of language: "only I heard the lower layers of my own remarks", while missing until almost too late the dangers of certainty in Margaret, the nanny (a precursor of Margaret in Spark’s 1990 novel Symposium), who contains echoes of Hogg’s justified sinner. Debatable Land explores issues of exile, colonising, maleness and femaleness, and Scottishness through its tale of a voyage in the South Sea, the central character, Alec, having to leave Scotland to find it and himself. McWilliam is concerned with issues of gender and class, primarily from an upper or middle class perspective, giving an odd but precise slant to these questions. This same class perspective occurs in Muriel Spark’s Symposium (1990) and Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia (1991). Barker alone places the whole of her novel regionally within Scotland and whether this regionality is essential for a realised "Scotland" will also be considered. All their novels are rooted in Scottish literary traditions, but they also use the idea of the outsider to structure their narratives. As well as considering the questions of the outsider and Scottishness, the paper will consider the intense self-consciousness of their style, the way in which all their writing foregrounds the question of language and the intricate ambiguities of meaning and the possibility that Barker and McWilliam are the inheritors of Spark’s literary legacy.
Julian Meldon D’Arcy (University of Iceland)
Wilkie Collins and Scotland
Wilkie Collins, the quintessentially Victorian English author, is most famous for his novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone and as the founder of the modern British detective story. One interesting aspect of Collins’ life and career has apparently been unnoted or even ignored, however, and that is his "Scottish connection". Collins’ parents made a runaway marriage in Edinburgh in 1822 (his mother was of Scottish origins) and his father knew Sir Walter Scott; he himself was named after a famous Scottish artist (Sir David Wilkie). Moreover Collins made an extensive visit to Scotland in 1842 with his father, and his affection for and memory of the country can be traced throughout his writings. It is thus the aim of this paper to illustrate in detail how Collins’ interest in Scotland and things Scottish played a small but significant part in his work as a whole.
Collins’ "Scottish connection" influenced his work in several ways. Scotland is the setting for at least three novels and provides a backdrop for important action in at least fifteen other stories and novels. Scottish characters are present in over a dozen of his novels and stories, sometimes as major or influential characters; moreover in at least two novels Collins recreates for his Scottish characters a very distinct Scots language.
Of greater importance and interest, however, is the influence on Collins of Scottish literature itself and other special features of Scottish life and society. Collins greatly admired Sir Walter Scott, who is directly referred to in at least a dozen novels, and was clearly influenced by him in certain aspects of plot and characterisation; themes from other Scottish writers, such as James Hogg, along with "second sight" or other forms of Scottish "canniness" are present in more than one story, and Scottish law provides vital plot elements in at least three major novels as well as in some short stories.
James A. Davies (University of Wales Swansea)
In Memoriam D. M. T.: Vernon Watkins and the Death of Dylan Thomas
Vernon Watkins’s friendship with Dylan Thomas began in 1935, when he read 18 Poems. Both were Swansea writers who became internationally famous. The two poets had very different personalities and life-styles; there is little doubt that the friendship meant far more to Watkins than it ever did to Thomas. Nonetheless, it survived various vicissitudes until the latter’s death in 1953.
Watkins’s grief at Thomas’s death and consequent notoriety resulted in at least eighteen poems – in Cypress and Acacia (1959), Affinities (1962) and Fidelities (1968) – that explore the effect upon him – and the general literary significance – of Thomas’s death.
The order of composition of most of these poems is not known with any certainty. But their order of publication and the order in which they appear in their respective volumes, does offer a sequence in which Watkins eventually masters his grief. Allowing for scale, one analogy is Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., which might place Watkins’s sequence in the tradition of English elegy from Lycidas through Adonais and In Memoriam to Ave Atque Vale.
Thus, two related questions are raised which are germane to this conference. Firstly, to what extent (if at all) is Watkins’s sequence a Welsh version of that English tradition? Secondly, is Watkins’s treatment of Thomas any more than a regional (provincial?) commemoration? Whatever the answers to these questions, this paper draws attention to unjustly neglected poetry of high quality.
/P>
William V. Davis (Baylor University)
"A Sweet and Terrible Labyrinth of Longing": The Presence of Place and the Place of Presence in the Poetry of Edwin Muir
Edwin Muir was born on the Orkney islands, off the north coast of Scotland, and lived his first fourteen years there. This barren but beautiful landscape left an indelible impression on Muir and he returned to Orkney whenever he could, although he spent most of his adult life elsewhere. In his poetry, however, Muir never really left Orkney and his early experiences there very far behind. His poems insistently return to his early life on Orkney and an Orkney setting is evident in most of them – even in those poems ostensibly set elsewhere. In short, Muir never ceased to be obsessed with his place of origin, a place where, as his last individual volume of poems suggests, he felt as if he had had "one foot in Eden". Using as examples poems chosen to include his full poetic career – extending from the early poems literally set in Orkney ("Childhood"), to poems set in ancient history or in mythological times ("Ballad of Hector in Hades"), to poems which posit an apocalyptic future beyond any specific time or place ("The Horses") – as well as references drawn from his extensive critical and autobiographical comments and commentaries, I trace Muir’s devotion to his early life and experiences in Orkney and to the distinctive landscape and the lore of these islands in establishing the setting for his poetry and in locating and developing his major themes.
Seodial Deena (East Carolina University)
Colonization and Canonization: Class Marginalization Through Education
"The colonial problem is one of the most urgent of those confronting the world today" (Mannoni). According to Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin "more than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism". On its own, colonialism has left indelible scars of rape, oppression, and underdevelopment in most Third World nations. These scars, whether economic or cultural, are imprinted on the minds of once colonized peoples. While many newly independent peoples have the sisyphean task of erasing these scars and restoring what the "cankerworm" has eaten, canonization, a new form of colonialism, threatens to continue the work of oppression and marginalization. The traditional literary canon creates inclusiveness and exclusiveness, reinforces stereotypes, and facilitates discrimination and oppression on the bases of race, class, and gender. This "great" Western art in reality is nothing but a justification for colonization (Baraka). This paper explores colonial and canonical marginalization on the basis of class, through education. It uses cultural criticism and a wide range of primary texts – British, Indian, African, and Caribbean literature – in a comparative analysis.
Colonialism developed and maintained a class system for its own interests through a carefully crafted educational system, whose objective was to serve the interests of the establishment. Colonial education further accounted for class oppression by creating "schizophrenia" in culture, politics, and language; and by the creation of two oppositional perspectives: the colonizer and the colonized. The gap between the upper class and lower class is widened, and the lower class is silenced through marginalization and exploitation.
The task of faithfully representing "the wretched of the earth" then falls into the hands of post-colonial writers from whom the Western civilization can learn "how to look into what is really going on in the world and why it has been going on and thus to learn about our own limitations" (Gugelberger). Canonical writers, therefore, should learn from "the wretched of the earth" and post-colonial writers because "any study of World Literature today which avoids considering this phenomenon called ‘Third World Literature’ is bound to be both parochial and fundamentally obsolete".
Sarah M. Dunnigan (University of Glasgow)
"O venus soverane": Erotic Politics and Poetic Practice at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI
It is a commonplace of English Renaissance criticism that amatory poetry written by courtiers during Elizabeth I’s reign was characterised by "impure motives": that the relation between lover and beloved served as an expedient metaphorical veil for political and social advancement. The copious love lyrics associated with the Scottish courts of Mary, Queen of Scots, and James VI in the mid to late sixteenth century richly exemplify this fusion of sexual and political languages. The paper analyses for the first time the poetic practice of what may be termed "erotic politics" in several different areas.
The series of love sonnets attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, was interpreted by her political contemporaries as testament of her "vile passione" for James Hepburn, Lord Bothwell, with whom she allegedly conspired to murder Darnley, her husband and briefly reigning king. These complex lyrics ironically transmute the conventional metaphor of amour courtois (the desire of a socially abject lover for a superior, sovereign beloved): the sovereign queen seduces her political subject but the sonnets darkly portray her sexual subjugation. The polemical Scottish literature surrounding the Darnley controversy condemns Mary’s alleged abuse of political and sexual power: she symbolises the antithesis of Elizabeth’s inviolate Virgin Queen.
The amatory poetry produced by courtiers at James VI’s court in the 1580s and 90s reveals the subtle implications of an erotic politics engendered by a sovereign who is male. Poetry written by Alexander Montgomerie and John Stewart delicately exploits the homoerotic tensions of amour courtois, pursuing the conceit of sovereign and sexual authority in lyrics dedicated to James.
Exploration of the poetic practice of "erotic politics" embraces issues such as the construction of femininity and masculinity, the figurative languages of desire, and the cultural milieux of the Marian and Jamesian courts.
Margaret Elphinstone (University of Strathclyde)
Travellers in Time: Three Travel Narratives by Scottish Women Writers
Travel writing texts necessarily reflect the colonial ideologies of their historical context. Contemporary ideology shapes the imagined boundary between the known and the unknown, the projections of what lies beyond this boundary, and the desirability, or dangers, of crossing it. Travel writing by women tends to compound the paradoxes which must be negotiated between adventure and misadventure; in travel writing by white, privileged, western women the place outside imperial boundaries may seem, falsely perhaps, to be familiar as well as alien. The conflation of geographical exploration and discovery of identity is arguably a premise of all travel writing, and yet adventurous travel by women is a challenge to a hierarchy which is constructed out of gendered, as well as imperialist, oppositions.
Three texts by Scottish women writers seem to be exemplary of these issues. The Indian section of Elizabeth Grant’s Memoirs of a Highland Lady (1850s, describing 1828–29) explicitly conforms with the ideology of contemporary imperialism. However, the subtext reveals a fascination with wild India, and with the fragility of the boundary between the ordered social world, and the chaos which lies outside it. Violet Jacob, in Letters and Diaries from India (1895–98), undertakes a personal adventure into the foreign world that was not a possibility for Grant. Jacob’s role as artist and writer is an acceptable expansion of her role as wife and mother, but her paintings are professionally executed, and achieved by solitary, adventurous quests into new territory. Kathleen Jamie’s The Golden Peak: Travels in Northern Pakistan (1993) brings critique of imperialist hierarchies from the subtext and into the open. The paradox is that Jamie does this in the context of the traditional colonial activity of travelling into foreign territory and then writing about it. Can travel writing be post-colonial?
Jamie, like Grant and Jacob, ventures into alien territory and gains personal liberation from her adventure, a freedom which is not necessarily related to the mores of the country she travels in. The boundaries of colonialism have not been annihilated in the post-modern context of 1993, but have moved in the direction of a truly post-colonial world. The three narratives, then, reflect the colonialism that has always informed western travel writing, at three distinct moments in its history, but at the same time subvert it, as they transgress a hierarchy of gender that imposes silence upon women’s excursions into a psychic space unknown to patriarchy.
Hedda Friberg (Mid Sweden University)
Women in City and Country in Liam O’Flaherty’s Novels
In Irish writing, a deeply rooted tendency to idealize the countryside and the rural experience, at the expense of the city and the urban experience, has long been discernible. Furthermore, a tendency to equate things rural with all that is truly Irish has contributed to the shaping of the national identity.
It can be argued that the tendency in Irish writing to idealize the countryside stems in part from a colonial impulse, on the part of the British, to infantilize native Irish culture. Liam O’Flaherty has been accused of partaking of the myths of the countryside in that certain of his portrayals of Irish peasants can be seen as being idealized and as containing elements of childishness. This charge can also be directed toward his portrayal of women. The problem with a literary idealization of women is, of course, that it prevents a clear-eyed assessment of their actual situation – in city and country both.
Drawing on six of O’Flaherty’s novels – The Black Soul, The Informer, Insurrection, Mr. Gilhooley, Skerrett and Thy Neighbour’s Wife – as well as on his travel book Two Years, this study focuses on the author’s portrayals of women. Bringing out O’Flaherty’s ambivalent attitude to peasants and, primarily, to women, the study will highlight instances of vacillation, in the novels, between idealization and infantilization of women. I will argue that whereas an idealization is primarily found in O’Flaherty’s portrayal of rural women, elements of infantilization tend to be found in portrayals of urban women, especially upper-class, educated ones. Women of the slum tend to share certain characteristics with country women.
I have examined the texts in a cultural context and I have applied close reading to pertinent passages of the novels.
In summary, I claim that the idealization and infantilization of women in which O’Flaherty does seem to indulge in his novels, appear to have a class-related dimension as well as a correlation to the city/country dichotomy.
Katherine H. Gordon (University of Glasgow)
Liltin’ in the "Eerie Hoose": Aspects of Self in the Poetry of Marion Angus
Written largely between 1921 and 1937, the poetry of Marion Angus (1866–1946) contains what Dorothy Porter calls "covert narratives": enigmatic accounts of both the internal and the external world. One reads in the ballad-like depictions of exteriors – landscapes, voices, and places – an evocation of complex psychological regions dominated by omissions and lacunae.
With this in mind, this paper will examine the twinned themes of desire and self-expression in Angus’s work, and will address the way in which Angus returns to these motifs throughout her oeuvre. In particular, I will explore the relationship between desirer and desiderata – who (or what) emerges as the object of the speakers’ desire? How does Angus describe desire, and in what way does she configure "female" desire differently from "male" desire? With this, I will discuss the interplay of silence and utterance in selected key poems, and show how this represents the elusiveness and richness of the female voice. How does Angus, speaking through a spectrum of different personae, connect expression to the formation – or limitation – of the self? Finally, how are desire and self-expression intertwined, and how does this complex association figure in her depictions of female selves? Ultimately, I hope to show that Angus’s poetry contains a surprisingly modern articulation of multiple, fluid selves whose existence hinges upon the (in)ability to speak.
Catherine Greensmith (University of Hull)
Literature in Translation: To Be or Not To Be, That Is the Question – with Particular Reference to D. H. Lawrence
When we consider literature through the ages, we often wonder what happens to the great works of the authors in our own countries once they have been translated in other languages. Why are works translated? What is being translated? How? By whom? When and why?
Based on the works of D. H. Lawrence, this paper will seek answers to the questions above and will also look at the specific translation challenges associated with the works of such an author. Examples will be taken mainly from the novels, but also from the short stories, and where appropriate the poems.
Other related questions will include: Is translation a linguistic transfer or does it imply rewriting? What are the difficulties associated with particular languages? What happens to images, humour, cultural references? ... And do translations age or even become out of date? How important are the translators’ notes, and what is their real role? What is lost (or sometimes gained) in translation?
The paper will conclude by looking at alternatives to translations, such as linguistic adaptations, simplified versions of the original texts, bilingual texts ..., and their implications.
Susanne Hagemann (University of Mainz/Germersheim)
Translating Region and Nation: Literature, Power, Politics
Translation has become one of the key words of cultural studies. The concept is increasingly being used in a highly metaphorical way which at first glance has little to do with the pre-postmodern reality of translating computer manuals for a living. This reality, however, has also been extensively theorized, namely by the functionalist strand of translation theory. The paper will explore the question of what the multiplicity of approaches to translation can tell us about the literature of region and nation. My main emphasis will be on overviewing issues of power and the politics of translation.Descriptive translation studies will serve as a starting point. Which source languages and cultures are favoured in a given target culture? How are these preferences affected by historical change? Is it possible to generalize about the source texts, e.g. in terms of authors or genres? Who publishes the translations, and how are they advertised? Who are the translators? Going beyond a purely descriptive approach, the materiality of translation can be related to its political dimension. Feminism and postcolonialism are the two strands of theory which have done most to make translation studies aware of power relationships, not only with regard to the translation market, the selection of texts, but also with regard to translational strategies. Do assimilative translations strengthen cultural hegemonies, or can they also function as a means of resistance? More generally speaking, in what ways can translations, and so-called pseudotranslations, promote a culture’s identity politics? The concluding section will discuss the politics of translation studies.
Marie Anne Hansen-Pauly (Centre Universitaire, Luxembourg)
Works of Pre-Confederation Canada: A Way to Explore a New Country?
This paper will focus on some early Canadian writers of the first half of the nineteenth century and their concern with the presentation of their country in literature. The emphasis will be on an analysis of the specific genres they chose to write about the new country.
In the early nineteenth century the study of the past and the collections of early documents were an important concern in Europe and the borders between history and literature were often blurred. So it is not surprising that especially in the Maritimes, an important objective for a writer like Thomas Chandler Haliburton was to explore the past of his region. If today he is mainly remembered for his satirical work, he however also devoted much of his time to extensive and detailed historical accounts and geographical descriptions. Indeed an important genre of this period seems to be travel literature: Howe’s Western and Eastern Rambles and Anna Brownell Jameson’s journal are fascinating examples addressed to local readers and people in England. The most famous and prolific women writers of the 19th century are without any doubt Susanna Moodie and her sister Catharine Parr Traill. A reading of their less well known works shows how they used popular novel forms, aimed especially at young readers, to propagate similar ideas to those exposed in their more autobiographical accounts. This paper will also point out some of the literary influences noticeable in all these works. Many indeed reflect the literary fashions of contemporary Britain. Gender and potential readership often determine significant aspects of form. Above all, however, despite their different objectives these writers have contributed to mirroring various facets of the colony. It becomes obvious that the early chapters of a country’s literary history often include works whose purpose is above all the transmission of facts, which the authors deem important for anyone interested in this country or region.
Richard Henninge(University of Mainz/Germersheim)
Derrida, Heidegger and the Place of Translation
Both Derrida and Heidegger locate a potential aporia, an apparently unbridgeable gap in the conceptual architecture of Plato in his use of the word khôra, the ancient Greek word meaning "the space or room in which a thing is, a place, a spot, Lat. locus: the place assigned, the proper place" (Liddell and Scott), in Timaeus 52a,b where Timaeus follows up on Socrates’ presentation of the idea of an ideal state with a merely probable account of the origin of the world which will dovetail into Kritias’ brief traditional tale of a no longer existent originary Athens bearing a mysterious resemblance to Socrates’ republic, an account which finds it necessary to introduce a "third nature" neither intelligible nor sensible to serve as the receptacle for the impressions of the ideal forms in the real world: this strange non-being, non-idea is the khôra. In 1954, at the end of Was heißt Denken, Heidegger says that the "determining interpretation for Western thought" was given to us by Plato, according to whom "between being and Being there is the chôrismos; he khôra means ‘the place’", and that afterwards this duplicity is in all our representing and uttering, all our doing and refraining from doing. To bridge this gap, this ontological difference between real existing beings and das Sein, a difference which itself has, according to Heidegger, been increasingly forgotten and conflated into the modern conviction in the sole existence of the real and hence the overemphasis on science, we must acclimate ourselves to the language of the Greeks, let ourselves be spoken by the Greek words, in order to translate the Greeks, to set ourselves over – über-setzen – into their, and our poets’, proximity to Being. Derrida, on the other hand, and specifically since his 1985-86 Paris seminar on "Le lieu: mythos et logos", has used the discussion of the khôra in Plato as a place from which to question Heidegger’s onto-theological tendencies, the privileged status granted to a single national idiom and the putative interrelationships between his philosophical thinking and his acquiescence in a dubious political agenda. In many instances this deconstruction aiming at exposing the unthought parts of Heidegger’s thinking takes the form of a meticulous analysis of his later work on Schelling, Nietzsche, and the poets Hölderlin and Trakl, which for Derrida often involves using translation, like khôra, as a conceptual tool to open up his readings, a tool whose effectiveness is a consequence of the fact that the place of translation is "itself" as paradoxical as the place of place in Plato.
Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir (University of Glasgow)
Full Circle: The Function of Place in the Fiction of Robin Jenkins
This paper will demonstrate how setting (or place) in Robin Jenkins’s fiction is important in terms of understanding the novelist’s own internal and native confusions, and his ideas of Scottish identity. Jenkins’s initial concern with Scotland as setting, his subsequent years of living abroad and writing about foreign places, and his final return to Scotland both as home and as setting for his writing, can be seen as a sort of "full circle", in which Jenkins himself as novelist goes through a similar process as many of his main characters. Jenkins as a writer is concerned with the same things all through his writing, irrespective of time or setting, and, like his characters, always finds the same human fallibility wherever he goes. Thus his "foreign" novels examine the same issues which are prominent in his Scottish fiction. Moreover, most of his foreign novels have Scottish characters in them, which indicates that even though the setting has been removed from Jenkins’s native country, the central issues of these novels are still very much Scottish and point towards a criticism of Scottish society which is very strong in his early Scottish novels. On the other hand, after returning to Scotland as a setting, Jenkins’s vision of Scottish society seems more mature and focused than in his early novels set in Scotland. Accordingly, it seems that his experience of foreign places, and his writing about them, has enabled him to get a clearer view of his native country and of the specific Scottish issues that he is mainly concerned with. Finally, the paper will examine some aspects of Scottish identity as seen in Jenkins’s depiction of British expatriates, and how these reflect upon some colonial issues such as clashes of cultural perceptions of morality and social behaviour.
S. Manzoorul Islam (University of Dhaka)
Narrating the Nation: Eliot’s Four Quartets and the Poetics of History
Taking the cue from Homi Bhabha’s suggestion (in Nation and Narration, Routledge, 1990) that "the Janus-faced discourse of the nation" leads to the construction of "the Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself" (p. 3) but going further to suggest that the Janus-ness is not so much an opposition of purposes (or a Derridean "double writing") but a conjunction of Eliot’s significatory differentials and his metaphysics, the article will explore the basic ambivalences, enigmas, repetitions, slippages that mark Eliot’s attempt to narrate the nation in Four Quartets. The first question that will naturally arise, which the article will try to answer, will be: what is a nation? since Four Quartets does not deal with either a political or a cultural "modern state" (or even a utopia or a sub-utopia). Then, in turn, the article will examine (a) the idea of a nation in Four Quartets as a temporal rather than historic entity; (b) how this temporality is located within genuine and imaginary spaces ("the garden", "our first world", "place of disaffection", "England") while constantly sliding towards an anchoring and reassuring historicity; (c) how the resulting tension is dissipated by the operation of another oppositional pair – the home and the world; (d) how the various textual strategies that Eliot applied (disconnections, repetitions, overlappings, displacements) "investigate the nation-state in the process of articulation of elements" (Bhabha p. 3); (e) how the familiar European paradigms (including place names) are woven in a "dialogic" mode with unfamiliar Eastern paradigms to strengthen a "polyphonic" nation with displaced domination; (f) how Eliot’s cartography evokes nostalgia as a perpetually present set of images of place that turn the notion of nation from a concept into an experience; and, finally, (g) how Four Quartets proposes the possibility of nation as a textual construct, a critical project, that orders itself around a vision (or a series of visions) of pure space, and ultimately dissolves all geographical frames/boundaries and does away with all forms of closure. The nation that Eliot narrates is both England and (any number of) its Other, while the text itself, through a self-circumscripting narrative structure (peculiar to Four Quartets) discloses the familiar paraphernalia of a nation-narrative. The article will end by examining whether the nation narrative does not opt for its own interiority (and therefore a certain indeterminacy) rather than a cultural/ideological locality.
J. U. Jacobs (University of Natal)
Fictional Countries with Real Histories: Naming and Mapping New Nations in Postcolonial Novels
In his consideration of the use of topography in literary and philosophical writings in Topographies (1995), J. Hillis Miller explains the topographical convergence of place and narrative in the toponym: "Place names make a site already the product of a virtual writing, a topography, or since the names are often figures, a ‘topotropography’." In fiction, place names generate the stories that play themselves out within a topography and with which they are encrypted. Not only does every novel provide an exercise in spatial mapping since it traces out in its course an arrangement of places, dwellings etc., but in its mapping of its physical landscape it also constitutes a kind of figurative and cognitive mapping. Novels narratively map a space, make it habitable: according to Miller, novels do not simply ground themselves on landscapes that are already there, but the writing of a novel – and the reading of it – participate in the act of making the landscapes that they apparently presuppose as already made and finished.
Postcolonial novelists have attempted to recover their countries’ histories from the imperialist discourses in which they have been marginalised. In doing so, they have recognised the need to reinscribe into their physical and cognitive maps their own place names and the narratives of the formerly colonised people that have been erased by what Paul Carter has called the "spatial history" of the colonisers who have charted these worlds in terms of their own colonialist epistemologies. The particular problem that this paper will consider is the way in which certain postcolonial novelists have presented the difficulties of emergent postcolonial nations in novels that, for various reasons, map these countries in patently fictional and often allegorical terms. For instance, in Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe describes the neo-colonial world of Nigeria under its military dictatorships in terms of a fictional state called Kangan; in A Hot Country, Shiva Naipaul sets his novel about the troubled emergence of Guyana in a fictional South American country called Cuyama with a capital Charlestown (read Georgetown) and a national flag that looks very much like the Guyanese one; in The Redundancy of Courage, Timothy Mo closely outlines the history of postcolonial East Timor and its subsequent recolonisation by Indonesia in relation to a country that he calls Danu; and in The Pleasures of Conquest, Yasmine Gooneratne parodically creates the symbolic postcolonial country, the Democratic Republic of Amnesia with its New Imperial Hotel, fifty years after independence from British rule. The paper will investigate whether such transparent fictionalisation is suitable for a project of addressing the actual histories of these different countries or for any kind of historical recovery, or whether, in its creation of what are standardised and often allegorical "Third World" countries with homogenised histories, these novels do not in effect replicate in uncomfortably similar ways the very colonial fictional maps that they are repudiating.
William R. Jones (University of Southampton)
Rivers and River Imagery in English Poetry
Rivers attract poets, and have always done so. This paper will explore some features of this attraction, and analyse examples from English poets, paying particular attention to named, specific rivers in poetry.
The cultural and economic significance of rivers historically is clear, and in that sense it is hardly surprising that they figure in literary works. But this paper will argue that underlying the factual presence of a known river in a poem there is an implicit or explicit metaphorical structure which draws on the peculiarly rich associations which rivers have for readers.
Rivers have teasingly contradictory characteristics. They obstruct travel across them, and so make natural frontiers, but enable movement along their course; they may flood and bring great fertility to the annual agricultural round, but floods also bring devastation; they provide fresh water but can carry pestilence to downstream towns. They carry boats on their surface, but can capriciously drown the occupants. Though their water is ever renewing, they themselves are very old, with names that can go back into etymological prehistory. To look at a river is to be aware of other worlds "upstream" or "downstream". In many cultures they are closely associated with baptism or spiritual cleansing and protection.
Alongside these metaphorical qualities of rivers there is the explicit presence of rivers in English poetry as emblems of English national pride. These range from the Thames as the presiding symbol of nationhood to other rivers emblematic of trade or national geography. There is an intriguing tradition of cataloguing rivers in poems of national celebration by, for example, Spenser and Drayton.
This paper will offer a discussion of these facets of river poetry, with examples from English poets from the Renaissance to the present day.
Heike Jüngst (University of Mainz)
Scotland in Picture Books for Children
Picture books for children which are set mainly in Scotland normally represent the place as supremely attractive, no matter whether the Highlands and Islands or Glasgow and Edinburgh are concerned. However, different books give different reasons for this attractiveness.
The Old Man of Lochnagar was written by an Englishman, namely HRH Prince Charles. Here we find a mythical Scotland inhabited by little people, a quiet, lonely and beautiful place.
A different approach in making Scotland appear as a locus amoenus has been taken by Mairi Hedderwick in her Katie Morag books. The world of Katie Morag is the reasonably small area of a Scottish island. In most cases, Hedderwick does not use nomina propria to describe parts or people of this island, but rather generic names ("the bay", "the holiday-makers[’] [house]" etc.). On the one hand, this evokes the world of childhood, where the first bay we see will forever stand as the example against which all other bays will be measured. On the other hand, it leads back to a mythical time when man named things for the first time, creating the original generic names, and thus represents a truly small world.
Another popular series of Scottish picture books are the Maisie books by Aileen Paterson. They are basically set in Edinburgh, but Maisie travels a lot, and many different parts of Scotland are represented in detailed and realistic drawings. Maisie herself is a little kitten, and the whole of Scotland is populated by anthropomorphic cats. The Maisie books have the explicit aim of teaching children about Scotland and even contain Scottish-English glossaries.
In all of these books, landscape and language play an important role and serve to describe Scotland as a country with its own and unique character.
Sandra Kromm (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Landscape and Gender: A Study of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
Landscape in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano performs a multiplicity of functions. Dominated by Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl and contrasting chasms, its spectacular Mexican backdrop provides authenticity of locale. More than that, its symbolic connection with the British Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, evokes his oppressive sense of sexual inadequacy, guilt, fear of women, and of life itself. Since the character of Firmin is the central focus of Lowry’s work, setting is significant in communicating and elaborating upon its major themes and preoccupations.
Aspects of Malcolm Lowry are represented in Geoffrey Firmin, the protagonist, and in his younger half-brother, Hugh. Like Hugh, Lowry had run away to sea although, oddly, with parental support, since after he negotiated a deal with his father, the family limousine deposited him upon the pier before the mocking gaze of the hardened seamen who become his mates and proceed to make his life hell. His ordeal at sea transforms Lowry into a hopeless alcoholic, which aspect of self is projected upon the Consul. Self-disgust and guilt dominate the portrayal. Critic Sherrill Grace traces Lowry’s sexual trauma to his relationship with his mother, a trauma which she connects, too, with his alcoholism, plagiarism, and latent homosexuality.
Through his brilliant and complex use of landscape and its connection with character, Lowry explores his own neuroses, dramatically distanced and elevated into one of the great art works of the twentieth century. Incorporating allusions to the Faustian and Dantean stories, he parallels the paradigm of Lucifer’s fall with the Consul’s fear of the Mexican landscape so jaggedly cut with barrancas and abysses. The Consul’s inner hell thus finds an external correlative. From the time of his first furtive and embarrassing sexual escapade in the "Hell Bunker", appropriately suggestive in its hollowedness, to his deathward plunge into the ravine – the inverted volcano – Geoffrey Firmin’s tortured escapism and his frustrated longing to love, are counterpointed by Lowry’s symbolic use of landscape.
Michael McAteer (Queen’s University Belfast)
W. B. Yeats and the Problem of Historiography: The Case of The King’s Threshold
This paper argues that the three positions dominating Yeats studies in recent years, the postcolonial, the formalist and the historical revisionist, fall short of a thorough account of history in Yeats’s work because each of them is predicated on an epistemology alien to Yeats’s thought. The King’s Threshold is a drama that exemplifies the sacral concept of history underlying Yeats’s work, in which an historical consciousness lies embedded in his aesthetics, but one that is both antipathetic to empirical historiography and to fin-de-siècle aestheticism. Yeats’s view of history is one that unveils the secret complicity between arbitrary violence and the rationality he identified with the Enlightenment deification of science. By making violence both the ground of the state’s attempt to subordinate the imaginative consciousness to that of reason, and of the imagination liberated from reason, Yeats presents sacral history as the witness of the fragmentation of history into the primal subject/object split. In revealing violence as the basis of this split, however, a redemptive view of history emerges from the reality of its fragmentation, since this violence unveils the common ground from which reason and myth emerge. History, then, cannot be understood in this play exclusively in terms of its meaning for popular Irish nationalism, its aesthetic presence as forgetfulness, or in terms of Maud Gonne’s marriage in 1903, the year it was first produced. These issues are relevant, but only when understood in terms of the form of historiography that the play presents.
J. Derrick McClure (University of Aberdeen)
William Soutar’s Theme and Variation: The Gamut of Literary Translation
William Soutar’s Theme and Variation, his last published collection, consists of a set of free translations and adaptations from various sources. Though tenuously united by theme they show a heterogeneity of style and technique matching the variety in the originals. The complete freedom which Soutar has assumed to treat his models as he wishes, producing everything from recognisable literary translations to poems bearing only the slightest relationship to their models, makes of the collection an interesting test case for questions on the limits of acceptability in poetic translation. As with the seventeenth-century poet-translator William Drummond of Hawthornden, Soutar has enriched the Scottish poetic corpus by freely adapting and naturalising from a range of foreign sources.
Amanda J. McLeod (University of Glasgow)
A Time and a Place: The Relocation of Gender Identity in the Early Historical Fiction of Naomi Mitchison
This paper will focus on the restrictions imposed on women in Britain during the 1920s and 30s, as reflected in the historical fiction of author Naomi Mitchison. I will endeavour to demonstrate that due to the patriarchal structure of British society at this time, it was impossible for a liberated writer to express her own sexual identity through the creation of contemporary settings; and that only by recourse to the historical genre was she able to do so. In discussing this, I will make a detailed analysis of her early novels and short stories, focusing on The Conquered, Black Sparta: Greek Stories, and culminating in her epic The Corn King and The Spring Queen.
This spectrum of Mitchison’s work covers a crucial period in British history, as the years between 1920, when The Conquered was published, until The Corn King’s arrival in 1932, were clearly delineated in terms of historical events. Britain was only beginning in 1920 to emerge from the debris of the First World War, amidst which the rights of women had been forgotten, and Mitchison brings gender issues to the forefront at a time when the specifically female experience of that environment was largely uncharted. It will be my aim to show how the social conditioning of the female, even in upper class society, was such that Mitchison had no choice but to take her characters into Ancient Greece and Rome in order to divert from them the disapproval of contemporary society. Even as she does so, however, a gentle probe uncovers careful paralleling of her own society and her own specifically female experience of it.
In each piece of work I shall examine the specifically gendered conflict between the individual and the state, and will discuss the successes, the shortfalls, and the progress the writing reflects, both in terms of Mitchison’s personal development and the development of British society.
Manfred Malzahn (UAE University, Al-Ain) with Joseph Yang (National Chung Cheng University)
Strange Bedfellows: The Languages and Literatures of Scotland and Taiwan
The parallel drawn in this paper may seem a far-fetched one, but anyone who is acquainted with both Scotland and Taiwan would almost immediately recognise certain political, linguistic, social or cultural facts, patterns and motifs which are common to both countries, if sometimes in an inverted form. To begin with, there may be doubts about the term country, as both names refer to a geographically, but not to a politically well-defined entity: Scotland’s future within or without the framework of the United Kingdom is, still and perhaps more than ever, a matter of debate, whereas the de facto independence of the Republic of China on Taiwan does not result in a secure and recognised status within the international community, and vis-à-vis the People’s Republic.
Recognition of the cultural identities of both Scotland and Taiwan depends on visible distinctions between the country and its larger neighbour, who has a claim to the source and to the guardianship of the linguistic norm. Taiwan’s range of linguistic varieties between Mandarin and non-Chinese aboriginal languages corresponds to Scotland’s spectrum which ranges from Standard English to Gaelic. The alignment of paradigms offers plenty of scope for a kind of literary translation which can accommodate variety between as well as within texts; it furthermore suggests comparisons of the ways in which literature produced under such conditions reflects political and social realities, as well as the extent to which it does or may play a part in the alteration or perpetuation of the circumstances from which it springs.
Robert James Merrett (University of Alberta)
Spiritual Places in The Longest Journey and Howards End: E. M. Forster’s Gendered Criticism of Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism
"places have a genius, though the less we talk about it the better" (Longest Journey)
"She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize England. She failed – visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying. But an unexpected love of the island awoke in her, connecting on this side with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable" (Howards End)
E. M. Forster’s fiction explores the relations between feelings and consciousness in ways inadequately captured by such terms as liberal humanism. Despite his impulse to satirize the stultifying effects of institutions, he struggled to understand why institutions cannot be easily displaced by individualism. As a narrator, Forster constantly checks himself and his characters from fixedly adopting ideological postures. While he sympathizes with socialism’s attacks on capitalism, he insists that history and geography mediate human aspirations and relations to such an extent that intellectual is no more acceptable than physical violence. The dialectic Forster creates between idealism and materialism, between the invisible and the visible, and between the ineffable and the speakable may be clarified by attending to the secular theology which he embodies in his fictional and non-fictional works. This dialectic expresses itself in his style – in his passionate calls for romance and his aloof wit and gnomic solemnity, in his mixture of classical and biblical allusions.
My paper will explore Forster’s attribution of homoerotic desires to male and female characters to enable them to create holy places that resist cultural institutions. I will explore how Forster cultivates narrative sensibility to advance a fuller humanity than may be conveyed by militarism, commerce and established social hierarchies. Forster’s admirable characters bring themselves and their situations into being with a symbolic freedom and sexual license far in advance of his era.
Andrew Nash (University of St. Andrews)
Understanding the Land in Scot(t)land
This paper will begin with an anecdote about the conductor Herbert von Karajan and a production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in order to indicate how images of Scotland and cultural productions connected with Scotland are frequently constructed in terms of the land or genius loci. It will be argued that this conception of Scottish national distinctiveness – which has strongly influenced both the creation and understanding of Scottish culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – has its origin in the influence and reception of Walter Scott in the Victorian period.
Scott’s treatment of nature and its influence on trends in nineteenth-century art criticism will be briefly indicated before analysis is made of illustrated editions of Scott’s poetry and the influence of his work as a whole on the development of Scottish art and photography. I will argue that the dissemination of Scottish literature in conjunction with topographically verifiable images of Scotland resulted in the construction of an international image of Scotland that was predominantly literary. It will be shown through an analysis of tourist guide books and local history books how Scott’s work came to be used to illustrate Scotland rather than the other way round.
I will argue that this method of understanding Scotland led on to the subsequent international reception of Kailyard literature as a realistic description of life in Scotland, and that this in turn has resulted in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism – evidenced in its attack on Kailyard and much Scottish film – prioritising the need for realism in Scottish cultural output.
Glenda Norquay (Liverpool John Moores University)
Wantin' Bodies: Female Sexuality and the Grotesque in the Fiction of Lorna Moon and Jessie Kesson
Drawing upon Bakhtinian theories of the carnivalesque, Mary Russo writes in her book The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (1994), that: "The grotesque body was exuberantly and democratically open and inclusive of all possibilities. Boundaries between individuals and society, between genders, between species, and between classes, were blurred or brought into crisis in the inversions and hyperbole of the carnivalesque." Through an engagement with Bakhtinian theory and feminist analyses of the "grotesque", this paper will focus upon the ways in which categorisation of both the physical and social body are called into question in a range of novels from the north-east of Scotland, focusing in particular on the work of Jessie Kesson and Lorna Moon, but also offering a comparison with Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s writing in A Scots Quair.
The writings of both Lorna Moon and Jessie Kesson demonstrate a fascination with itinerants, with social outsiders, and with bodily deformity. In the fiction of both, these "outlins" (as Jessie Kesson called them), or marginal figures, are used as a means of questioning social and sexual boundaries. In their writing this is specifically linked to the emergent sexuality of central female figures. This paper will seek to explore why troubled areas of female sexuality can for these writers be best mapped out in relation to the grotesque, and compare this with the patterns of sexuality traced in the better known work of Grassic Gibbon. It will consider the relationship between such blurring of sexual and bodily boundaries and the wider parameters of social and national identity. It will also seek to address the issue of why a fascination with deformity and the grotesque is such a salient feature in this group of writers from the north-east of Scotland.
Eloisa Nos Aldás (Jaume I University, Castellón)
Shadowy Cultural Memory in Hugh MacDiarmid’s City
This paper focuses on the historical memory that poetic imagination reconstructs in the representation of the city in a selection of Hugh MacDiarmid’s work. The city not only as an urban centre but as a cultural symbol, as the signifier for a whole transformation that takes place during the interwar period; it is a signifier that also reflects the causes and consequences of the wars and other dreadful facts which occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. We are going to deal, therefore, not only with a regional and national voice, but with a universal voice as well.
Hugh MacDiarmid and, mainly, those of his poems dealing with the image of the city are going to be the central corpus, but different works about the same problematic will be mentioned within a comparative framework in order to sketch a general tendency in Modernism. Therefore, authors like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka or Federico García Lorca will be considered in order to integrate Scottish literature within the international context.
The themes of disintegration, routine, alienation, solitude, silence ... are interwoven in this paper as part of a crisis of culture, of education ... of humanity, as a hint for tracing inhumanity, sub-humanity, and dehumanization in a period when human closeness is disappearing and human beings cosified. In conclusion, we pay attention to MacDiarmid’s considerations of the city and its cultural implications: the culture that has created it, the culture that takes place in it and the culture that it is creating, all under the shadow of a historical crisis.
Irina Novikova (University of Latvia)
Exposing "the great danger of what I am": In the Darkroom of Jamaica Kincaid (A Small Place and Lucy)
The paper will explore the mother–daughter relationship in the novel Lucy and in an autobiographical book, A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid in terms of language, identity and the quest for wholeness, central to women’s anglophone Caribbean literature.
A perspective into the mother–daughter relationship will be combined with the discussion of the functions of the autobiographical. The paper will discuss
The motif of flight from "sub"culture will be discussed as a desire of an exile from a "tourist gaze" investing the locale with significations of "accultured" exotics. The question of how these significations, as "scenarios of colonial fantasy" (Homi Bhabha), have been constructing "imagined communities", and in them "imagined women", will also be addressed.
Rosa E. Penna (Catholic University of Argentina/University of Buenos Aires)
Eudora Welty: An Intimate Sense of Place
Jan Nordby Gretlund says that for Welty "[p]lace comprehends not only the natural physical and geographical characteristics, but also the sensory and imaginative experience of the setting." Starting with Eudora Welty’s essay "Place in Fiction" (1956) and using other references she has made – mainly in interviews – about the importance and use of place in her fiction, we shall look closely at some of her short stories, in order to determine in which ways her reflections on "place" keep reappearing in her work, giving it a kind of "physical texture".
Although most of Welty’s characters come from a geographical place – the Mississippi state – which gives them "dramatic significance", other settings appear in her fictions as well, which operate as "sources of inspiration and knowledge". The concept of moving from one place to another, the meaning of journeys and the paths that lead to destinations have also been elaborated on by Welty and repeatedly used in her fictions.
Patricia Plummer (University of Mainz)
Leaving Small Places: Place and Gender in the Writings of Edna O’Brien and Jamaica Kincaid
Both Edna O’Brien, Irish author living in London, and Jamaica Kincaid, Antiguan author living in New York, write about the places they grew up in. In retrospect, Ireland and Antigua appear as "small places" dominated by (post-)colonial power structures.
The paper focuses on A Pagan Place (1970) by Edna O’Brien and Annie John (1985) by Jamaica Kincaid, two fictional autobiographies that are also novels of female initiation. Within the confinements of the respective environments, the authors depict small communities dominated by familial bonds. At the centre of each novel stands the female narrator-protagonist, closely bound to the mother, yet struggling to free herself from this symbiotic relationship. The ultimate promise of independence in each novel is that of migration.
The paper examines the depiction of female childhood, the passage to adolescence and adulthood and the development of female identity as well as gender relations and gendered spatial concepts.
Donna L. Potts (Kansas State University)
"When Ireland Was Still Under a Spell": Miraculous Transformations in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s reliance on Irish linguistic and folk traditions may be regarded as part of a more comprehensive effort to establish a cultural identity for Ireland in order to dispel the psychic dislocation precipitated by colonization and emigration. Ni Dhomhnaill has stated that her preference for writing in Irish Gaelic stems not only from her desire to call attention to the language issue in contemporary Ireland, but also from her wish to revive, within the Irish philosophic tradition, the pre-modern belief in the simultaneous existence of at least two realms of being: the worldly or natural, and the otherworldly or preternatural. Irish folklore is likewise rooted in a belief in the link between natural and preternatural realms, and often features transformations of beings from one realm to the other. Ni Dhomhnaill argues that Irish Gaelic was unaffected by the Enlightenment, because its few remaining speakers, concentrated in rural areas in western Ireland, were not exposed to Enlightenment thinking; likewise, Irish folklore was preserved by uneducated Gaelic speakers predominantly located in western Ireland, whose tales often died with them. The death of both Irish Gaelic and Irish folklore may be attributed to the English conquest. Ni Dhomhnaill’s seamless melding of Irish folk tales with historical "official" accounts leads one to question whether the reality imposed by English colonizers is any more valid than the reality offered by Irish peasants. Thus, by juxtaposing two apparently conflicting versions of reality – the scientifically verifiable account, and the account gleaned from myth and legend – Ni Dhomhnaill encourages us to acknowledge their equal validity. By presenting a tradition in which transformation is possible, and indeed customary, she upholds the prospect of cultural renovation for Ireland, a country whose history is in its folklore.
Alan Riach (University of Waikato)
The Idea of Order in "On a Raised Beach": The Language of Location and the Politics of Music
No modern Scottish poem is more significantly located than "On a Raised Beach" and no poet is more committedly nationalist than Hugh MacDiarmid; but the poem requires reference to more than its particular regional site and its author’s national bias.
This paper will consider the coherence of language and argument in "On a Raised Beach" with reference to MacDiarmid’s poetic language and career as a whole. In the light of Seamus Deane’s recent work on modernity and nationhood, I shall re-examine such familiar tropes as the identification of the Scots tongue with alcohol and English with sobriety.
In MacDiarmid’s early poems, Scots functions as a visceral link between the body and national identity (pre-eminently in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle but evidently also in such relatively minor poems as "The Sauchs in the Reuch Heuch Hauch"); in In Memoriam James Joyce, the "realm of music" is proposed as a "country" where the politics of language find trans-national meaning.
"On a Raised Beach" is the axis between these, presenting the artifice of the text in a traditional modernist fashion, evoking landscape in ways which disrupt the nineteenth-century Romantic sense of the "scenic" while ordering an argument into what might be described as a coherent musical shape.
I shall exemplify the first two of these practices but I am more concerned with the third, for it offers a way of comprehending a major poem which otherwise remains curiously elusive.
I would also like to refer further back, briefly, to the language of national identity in Scott, and then forward, to ideas of order, nationality and the individual in two more recent texts: Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
Klaus H. Schmidt (University of Mainz/Germersheim)
Scottish-American Cosmopolitanism, Colonial Identities, and the Problem of Multiple Audiences: A Reading of Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium (1744)
This paper combines close reading and historical contextualization and investigates Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium (1744) as an ambivalent cultural performance in mid-eighteenth-century British America. The travelogue’s complexity is derived from the tensions between Hamilton’s self-fashioning as a cosmopolitan gentleman in a transnational republic of letters and the colonial’s sense of geographical and political marginality which, paradoxically, is enhanced rather than mitigated by the traveler’s defensive rejection of provincialism. It is also derived from the variant cultural and regional identities that are negotiated in the narrative. In response to the renewed interest in "the audience" and its role in influencing the form and content of literary works, the paper analyzes the subtextual inscription of both Hamilton’s alternate vantages as a Scot, Britisher, American, and Marylander and his awareness of the multiple audiences reading the travelogue on both sides of the Atlantic.
Kirsten Stirling (University of Glasgow)
Imagined Bodies and the Landscape of Home: Woman as Nation in the Fiction of Alasdair Gray
This paper will examine Alasdair Gray’s construction of women as symbols of nation in 1982, Janine and Poor Things. In both novels Gray explores the idea of constructing a woman, moving from the imagined women of a man’s pornographic fantasies in 1982, Janine to the literal, Frankenstein-esque construction of a woman in Poor Things. I will demonstrate how Gray both draws upon the traditional iconography of woman as nation and also problematises both the use of woman as symbol and the concept of nation itself.
The fantasies of bondage and rape in 1982, Janine represent the breakdown and corruption of the political processes of the state. The imagined fantasy women then are to be read as symbolising the state – a man-made structure within society. However, the symbolic position of "real" women in the novel is less obviously articulated. In the realist narrative, women are described in terms of geography, landscape and home, implying a more organic conception of nation.
I shall relate this gap between the symbolic positions of real and imagined women to the construction of Bella Caledonia in Poor Things. I will analyse two levels on which Bella is constructed: the anatomical construction of her body and the external construction of her appearance and attitudes. The anatomical construction of Bella can be related to the idea of the Body Politic and the mechanical workings of state, while her external construction is related to a more mythical and romantic representation of Scotland.
I shall argue that in these two novels Gray is attempting to both articulate and negotiate the gap between political and mythical constructions of Scotland. In making the female body the site on which such questions are raised, he is treading a thin line between deconstructing and simply reproducing the traditional iconography of woman as nation.
Karl-Heinz Stoll (University of Mainz/Germersheim)
Translation and Interpreting: New Trends in the Profession – New Curricula
The profession:
The training:
Gertrud Szamosi (Janus Pannonius University)
Regional and National Identities in Hungary and Scotland: Péter Esterházy and Alasdair Gray
Trying to define the self is one of the most controversial topics that re-emerge in different contexts varying from political, historical, psychological and cultural perspectives. While on the one hand we experience various disintegrative processes of fragmentation and try to assimilate by adopting multiple, multi-cultural perspectives, at the same time we also try to understand and define "our selves" under the changing circumstances.
Literary narratives have traditionally been told about and for the members of a community. Besides the construction of selfhood, they can also be modelled as a form of textuality, therefore fictional narratives can offer usable models for the creative processes of self-construction. Postmodern metafictional and anti-narrative elements will be examined and the role they play in the construction of the self on the level of author, narrator and characters.
The present literary analysis will focus on the works of a Scottish and a Hungarian writer: Alasdair Gray and Péter Esterházy. The writers of these two nations were selected for the reason that Scotland and Hungary, through their different historical and cultural developments, offer European models of identification for small nations that often had to struggle for survival in the shadow of more powerful cultures that have enjoyed a positional superiority compared to them.
Hanne Tange (University of Glasgow)
Twilight Songs: Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the End of Old Scotland
Songs of mist, songs of twilight, Scotland’s singing is so sad Chris Guthrie concludes at her wedding in Sunset Song, and her own song, of sunset, war and wasteland, is indeed the saddest of them all. For the isolated, historyless condition of pre-war Kinraddie is impossible; sooner or later the macrocosm will impose itself on the microcosm, clouds of history will gather around the local community, and its outlook will change forever.
My paper will be an examination of the small Scottish community before it is exposed to macrohistoric developments, the nature of the upheaval and its results, and for that purpose I have chosen two novels, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom, which together cover the essential Scottish experience. Butcher’s Broom tells the story of Highland decline, of the small world of the Riasgan which is being torn to pieces first by the Napoleonic Wars, then by the Highland Clearances: Sunset Song illustrates the Lowland experience as Kinraddie, a crofting community in the Mearns, is invaded by the forces of History, World War I turning it into a Wasteland. Both novels end in a state of despair: the meeting of macrohistory and the local community has brought about the disruption of the latter, the old Scottish way of life is possible no more.
Johanna Tiitinen (University of Helsinki)
"From Truth to Fiction: A True Story" – Juha K. Tapio’s Frankensteinin muistikirja and the Resurrection of Frankenstein
My paper will compare a Scottish and a Finnish rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1994) and Juha K. Tapio’s Frankensteinin muistikirja ("Frankenstein’s notebook", 1996). Shelley’s novel serves as the main link between the two novels as I examine the ways in which they dramatise the use of narratives of fiction and history as building materials of identity. I will focus on the intertextuality and metafictionality of these novels which "steal" bits and pieces from past texts, leave the seams visible as in Frankenstein’s monster, and thus highlight the actual process of creation. More specifically, I intend to discuss the implications of blending history and fiction: by relating history with fiction, what kind of view of history do these novels offer?
I will approach this question for instance by studying the playful ways the novels mix fictional and historical characters. Gray’s female protagonist, Bella Baxter, is resurrected after her suicide by the scientist Godwin Bysshe Baxter, who replaces her brain with that of her unborn baby. The character of Bella echoes both the creator of Frankenstein and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, while her "creator" Godwin refers to both Percy Shelley and William Godwin. Juha K. Tapio, on the other hand, has "Ernst" Hemingway introduce "Gertrud" Stein and her diary, which contains the undertaker Frank Stein’s notebook. The latter claims to be the true version of the creation of Frankenstein.
Finally, I will extend my discussion of the relation of history and fiction to the narrative structures of the novels. Gray’s narrative is as complex as Tapio’s: it is divided into two competing sections, Bella’s husband’s fantasy and her own more realistic letter, both claiming to be the true versions of the story. Such complexity and contradiction, I will argue, directs our attention to the way the story is presented and by whom, and why one story is accepted as true and the other is not. In order to force us to think about how memory works, what is involved in the process of writing and the construction of identity, the authors of these novels question single truths by rewriting other, alternative histories. In short, my aim in this paper is to study how differently and/or similarly these two novels resurrect other histories.
Zsuzsanna Varga (University of Edinburgh)
Foreshadowing Feminism: Spinsterhood and Scottishness in Mrs Oliphant’s Scottish Fiction
My proposed paper takes issue with the previous readings of Mrs Oliphant’s late Scottish novels, most particularly with the readings of Kirsteen. Until now, traditional readings have disassociated the novel’s gender aspects from its regional aspects: traditional Scottish criticism (Douglas Gifford) sees a "mythic [national] regeneration" in Kirsteen, while the traditional feminist readings (Peterson, Rubik, etc.) see it as the pinnacle of Oliphant’s feminist self-consciousness. Alternatively, the single recent attempt to link the discourses of gender and regionality suggests that the historically backward nature of Scottish society and the outmoded nature of female virtues of self-sacrifice and moral integrity embodied in Kirsteen do underwrite each other (Jay). Despite their differences, all the above readings suggest that geographical marginality and modernity cannot coexist.
Instead of relying on an assumed connection between marginality and backwardness, I suggest that it is precisely the supposedly marginal and backward Scotland that had provided Oliphant with the social category of the Scottish spinster, who, under the name of "independent woman" or "female householder", was later on to grow into an iconic figure of Victorian feminism. The Scottish spinster is the heroine of Oliphant’s first successful novel (Margaret Maitland, 1849), and a recurrent character in her journalism discussing Scottish issues, always spoken about with great appreciation. For some Victorian feminists, the category of the spinster served the purpose of negotiating the relationship between the feminine and the public. Oliphant’s concerns were similar to that, inasmuch as she wanted to see women assert themselves in public while not jeopardising the domestic ideal. Therefore, Kirsteen (and Joyce) cannot be regarded as standing at the end of a developmental, liberating process of discarding the confinements of Victorian patriarchy, since Oliphant had challenged the marriage plot long before. On the other hand, the outmoded nature of the female ideal, represented by these Scottish heroines, is precisely the same ideal of integrity endorsed by some Victorian feminists. In Oliphant’s view, therefore, Scotland is precisely the same ideal of integrity endorsed by some Victorian feminists. In Oliphant’s view, therefore, Scotland is precisely the ideal breeding ground for those modern female types that correspond to late Victorian feminist demands.
Andries Wessels (University of Pretoria)
Intercultural Relations and Subordination in Pauline Smith’s The Beadle
In 1926, Pauline Smith, a British-born South African writer, associated with the arid region of the Little Karoo, published her only novel, The Beadle. The romantic sub-plot of the novel focuses on the involvement between an innocent Afrikaans girl from a bywoner (tenant farmer/white labourer) family, Andrina, and an upper-class Englishman, Harry Nind. The relationship between the two young characters from disparate cultural and social backgrounds, is exploited by Smith to uncover and comment on the nature and relationship of the two cultures involved, and on the structures and motions of power at play in the broader, cultural context. When Smith writes that "the Englishman prided himself on being a free agent [while] Andrina knew herself to be entirely in the hands of God", she is clearly describing two national weltanschauungen, two ways of life, the British and the Boer, the Empire and the Little Karoo, as much as the particular tenor of the relationship between the two individuals. The relationship not only exemplifies cultural alienation and misunderstanding, but the subordination of one culture to another within an imperial or colonial context. The novel offers an early South African example of the now familiar analogy between predatory imperialist/dominating male on the one hand and colonial victim/oppressed female on the other. While there is no doubt that Smith favours those values, characterized as female, which she associates with the rural, colonized Afrikaners in the novel, over those, characterized as male, associated with the more sophisticated but imperialist English, an ironic tension can be detected in the position of the author herself – between her explicit endorsement of Afrikaner culture as a mythologized vehicle for notions of innocence and (female and colonial) suffering, and the unconscious manifestation in her writing of those very imperial and colonial prejudices she appears to decry.
Joss West-Burnham and David Roberts (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Dialogues of Doubt: Masculinity and Englishness in Pat Barker's "War Trilogy"
In the introductory pages to his book, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, the historian Eric Hobsbawm notes that "no one who has been asked by an intelligent American student whether the phrase ‘Second World War’ meant that there had been a ‘First World War’ is unaware that knowledge of even the basic facts of the century cannot be taken for granted". These basic facts of the First World War are revisited by the English novelist Pat Barker in her "war trilogy" – Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road – published over the last ten years. These novels can be seen as rewriting and rethinking the past in relation to gender and place as well as reshaping the literary landscape of the present. In her fictional representations of masculinity and femininity during this catastrophic period, she utilises our contemporary ideas about gender formations and prescriptions in order to rethink the trajectories of these outlined in past events and discourse.
Her novels, in their incorporation of cultural memory and myth through the re-envisioning and imagining of the events in the lives of "real" figures such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Dr W. Rivers juxtaposed with fictional characters, also work to remind us that "men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire).
Exploring textuality, gender and temporality, this paper will examine how these novels deal with the continuing nightmare of the First World War – both as the inaugurating event of the twentieth century and as a series of specific individual tragedies and representations.
Herb Wyile (University of Alberta)
Historicizing Regionalism as a Critical Term in Canadian Literary Criticism
One of the most significant features of contemporary scholarship on the literature of region and nation is the increasing recognition of the use of the term regionalism as both culturally specific and historically variable; regionalism, critics are increasingly inclined to observe, means different things at different times and in different places, and its use as a term is to a great degree shaped by the particular regional-national dynamics of a given nation-state. The proposed paper provides an illustration of these dynamics by looking at the emergence of regionalism as a critical term in literary criticism in English Canada in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the influence on its usage of debates about cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the local, as well as on the use of the term regional to refer to the status of Canadian literature in relation to English literature. The paper then focuses on centre–periphery tensions in Canada during the latter half of the twentieth century and their influence on the connotations of regionalism, as well as briefly sketching its profile in a globalized age at the end of the millennium.
As Raymond Williams notes in Keywords, the term regionalism is a relatively new one, going back only to the late 19th century, and its use in literary criticism has an even shorter history, though the term sectionalism serves in some ways as a precursor in American and English-Canadian literary criticism. This paper tracks the historical and cultural inflections of the term regionalism through focusing on its use in English-Canadian literary criticism, but also highlights those inflections by briefly noting both similarities and differences with the ways in which the term has functioned and evolved in British and American literary criticism. As Williams argues, "variations and confusions of meaning are not just faults in a system, or error of feedback, or deficiencies of education. They are in many cases, in my terms, historical and contemporary substance." Such a historical and etymological consciousness is certainly evident in the study of national literatures, but is only just emerging in the study of regional literatures – a situation this paper seeks to redress.
Andrew Young (University of Glasgow)
The Scottish Small Town Created in Early-Twentieth-Century Novels
In this paper I will suggest how three authors with similar social concerns all consciously choose a small town milieu in which to set novels exploring their visions of the materialist moral crisis affecting Scotland, and that this choice of setting has its roots both in the history of the Scottish burgh and in earlier Scottish literature; consequently the three authors fictionalise and employ their small town settings in similar, comparable ways. The three novels I intend to discuss are The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown (1901); Gillespie by John MacDougall Hay (1914); and Cloud Howe by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1933).
The historical basis for the Scottish small town novel of materialist crisis lies in the urban history of Scotland. Based on earlier European models, the original Scottish burghs were largely built from scratch, founded on principles of property, profit and exchange during an era of predominantly rural, subsistence population and characterised by the human hierarchy of burgh councils and officers. Materialism and elitism have thus been inherent in the structure of Scottish burghs from their very origins, and these are the elements, taken at their worst extremes, which are so criticised by Brown, Hay and Gibbon as contributing to a moral crisis in the aftermath of Scotland’s turbulent industrial nineteenth century.
The literary basis for these novels lies in the "Kailyard" movement of the late nineteenth century. Although all three of my chosen novelists have, quite justifiably, been discussed with international writers, the distinctive small town settings which connect the three so closely all appear to have been designed at least partly in reaction to the pious, impoverished communities popularised by the Scots Ian MacLaren and J. M. Barrie. I will discuss how Brown, Hay and Gibbon deviate from the "Kailyard" stereotype to incorporate themes of acquisitiveness, bigotry and predestined tragedy in their novels, and create materialist "monsters" and reductive "tragic choruses" among their small town populations to illustrate these themes. I will suggest however that without the work of Barrie in particular, these novels would probably not exist in their finished forms.
What Is Region and Nation? A Forum
What are the internal dynamics of both region and nation? What social, political, economic and linguistic forces define/delimit region and nation?
What external pressures weigh on region and nation? What does cultural relativism and/or multiculturalism do to regions and nations?
What forms of internationalism are there that challenge concepts of region and nation? How does the idea of European unification relate to regionalism, nationalism and internationalism? What sense does it make to talk about a world order or a citizen of the world?
What is the relation of imperialism and consumerism?
How do geographical and geometrical metaphors help us to understand region and nation?
What does it do to our conceptual frameworks if we have nations within nations? Nations within regions?
What is the most useful definition of borders?
| Susanne Hagemann: | home
publications |
Edited by Dorothée Behr and Susanne Hagemann.
Last updated: 13 February 2002.