This volume gathers together essays on Scottish literature, diverse in historical period, mode, and form in honour of Professor R.D.S. Jack, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Chronologically, the collection sweeps from the early middle ages to the early twentieth century, from Robert Henryson to J.M. Barrie, conveying a sense of the shifting and subtle identities and continuities of Scottish literary traditions across the centuries, and opening up, through a distinctive and unusual range of writers and texts, unfamiliar aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic landscapes. Unusual and wide-ranging in subject and scope, the volume explores Scottish medieval romance and allegory, Renaissance court performance, early modern travel writing, seventeenth-century poetry, Sir Thomas Urquhartâs universal language theory, Scottish Romanticism, Burns and Barrie. Shared threads of interest run through the collection: a questioning of the canonical; attentiveness to questions of language, rhetoric, and form; and a commitment to uncovering the dynamic interaction between European and Scottish traditions. Collectively, the volume charts a new series of imaginative cross-currents across historical periods and literary modes, attesting the importance of, and necessity for, a critical vision of Scottish literature which is pluralistic, comparative, and sensitive to form, mode, and rhetoric.
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Jack MACQUEEN and Alastair FOWLER: Foreword
Sarah CARPENTER and Sarah M. DUNNIGAN: Introduction
Elizabeth ELLIOTT: The Open Sentence: Memory, Identity and Translation in the Kingis Quair
Kevin J. MCGINLEY: âIn brief sermone ane pregnant sentenceâ: Puns and Perspectivism in Robert
Henrysonâs The Testament of Cresseid
David MOSES: A Tough Nut to Crack: Robert Henrysonâs Nut and Kernel Metaphor
Sergi MAINER:Eger and Grime and the Boundaries of Courtly Romance
John CORBETT: âVerbs, mongrels, participles and hybridsâ: Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartyâs
Universal Language
Sarah CARPENTER: Love and Chastity: Political Performance in Scottish, French and English
Courts of 1560s
Sarah M. DUNNIGAN: Drummond and the Meaning of Beauty
John J. MCGAVIN: Thomas Ker of Reddenâs Trip to the Low Countries, 1620
David J. PARKINSON: Rutherfordâs Landscapes
Murray PITTOCK: Robert Fergusson and the Romantic Ode
Kenneth SIMPSON: Burns and Barrie: âDeceptive Artistsâ
Andrew NASH: J.M. Barrie and the Third Sex
Professor R.D.S. Jack MA, PhD, DLitt, F.R.S.E., F.E.A.: Publications
Index