Editorial.
Dunnigan, Sarah ; McCulloch, Margery Palmer ; Brown, Ian 等
SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW is the leading international print journal
for Scottish literary studies, committed to approaching Scottish
literature in an expansive way through exploration of its various
social, cultural, historical and philosophical contexts, and of literary
forms, both traditional and new. We are interested in comparative work
with literatures from beyond Scotland, the interaction of literature
with expressive media such as theatre and film, and in encouraging
debate on issues of contemporary significance related to Scottish
literary studies, so that SLR is both responsive to, and creative of,
new readings and approaches. The journal is listed in the MLA
International Bibliography and from 2013 onwards is accessible online
via Project MUSE.
The content of the essays in this autumn/winter issue ranges widely
from the scatological satire of late medieval and early modern poetry to
the poetics of the Romantic love lyric and the tender Marian iconography
of George Mackay Brown. In different ways, though, each piece is
concerned with the absorption of the past within the present. In the hot
June sunshine of this year, David Lyndsay's Ane Satire of the Three
Estates was resurrected in a remarkable new staging. The first
professional production of the full text since the performances of 1552
and 1554, it came to life again within the evocative spaces of
Linlithgow Peel, Linlithgow Palace, and Stirling Castle. In his essay,
Greg Walker, a member of the academic team who worked in collaboration
with the director Gregory Thompson, the AandBC Theatre Company, and
Historic Scotland, reflects on how and why this new version generates
different artistic and political implications from Tyrone Guthrie's
famous 1948 staging. The piece suggests what might be gleaned from
experiencing afresh the Satire's potent social and political brew
in terms of our understanding of the Scottish Renaissance court and
civic cultures which fostered it, and the possible cultural and
political resonances it holds for us now. The satirical, polemical
energies of later medieval Scottish culture also surface in David
Salter's exploration of the neglected anonymous poem, The Freiris
of Berwik. This, too, is a comic laceration of various kinds of
authority, spiked with the resonances of its location and setting in the
eponymous town, but it is also revealed as a text which skilfully
reassimilates and transforms its earlier Chaucerian and European models.
Its topical comic satire therefore works more powerfully through this
framework of comparative imaginative precedent and allusion. And if more
proof be needed of the rebarbative, resistant spirit of the earlier
period, then it is found in David Stevenson's essay which presents
a new case for William Drummond of Hawthornden's authorship of
Polemo-Middinia, a riotous poem full of carnivalesque subversions of
geographical, bodily, and linguistic borderlines. In so doing, Stevenson
suggests that the work can also be seen as a careful, politically
encoded poem, accruing new meaning when it was revised and republished
during a period of civil war and therefore making it 'a remarkable
anomaly in the Scottish print culture of this troubled age'.
The essays by Adam White and Linden Bicket turn to the subjects of
Romantic poetry and late twentieth-century fiction. Refining our
awareness of how John Clare, the Northamptonshire poet, engaged with
Scottish poetry, White identifies how Burns was a 'crucial
precedent' for Clare, especially in his practice as a love
lyricist. He charts the 'hybrid power' of Burnsian poetic
imprints across the emotional and psychological landscapes of this
strand of Clare's work. Discussion of cultural precedent and
literary strategy are also melded in Linden Bicket's account of
iconography and symbolism in what she considers 'the highpoint of
George Mackay Brown's Marian oeuvre', Time in a Red Coat
(1984). Drawing on new archival material, her essay explores how Mackay
Brown's work imaginatively syncretises the Virgin's global
cultural resonances as well as an indigenous Catholic past. As always in
the autumn/ winter issue, opinions and reflections on new publications
in the field--editions, essay collections, individual studies--are
gathered in a substantial Reviews section.
At the time of going to press, we learnt of the death of Dr Ken
Simpson. We would like to record our sadness at this loss, and to note
that a tribute will appear in the next spring/summer edition of the
journal. His most recent book, an essay collection in honour of the late
Professor G. Ross Roy, Robert Burns & Friends, edited with Patrick
Scott, is reviewed in the present issue.
Sarah Dunnigan
Margery Palmer McCulloch
Editors
This volume of Scottish Literary Review marks the last for which Dr
Sarah Dunnigan and Dr Margery Palmer McCulloch act as editors. They have
served in this role jointly since 2007; whilst Dr McCulloch first took
up her editorship in 2004. Readers of the journal will recognise the
remarkable scholarship and attention to detail they have brought to
their task and the ways in which under their tutelage the journal has
gone from strength to strength. Scottish "Literary Review is a
leading international peer-reviewed journal in what is an expanding
field of study. That the field is expanding is in no small measure due
to their work in maintaining the high standards of the journal's
scholarship and their readiness as editors to sustain the depth and
breadth of its literary concerns. During their time as editors many
important articles have appeared and it is with a sense of gratitude for
the ways in which they have focused the work of the journal and given it
enhanced standing during their editorship that I thank them for their
work. The new editor of the journal is Professor Gerard Carruthers
(University of Glasgow) and I know he joins me in gratitude for the
healthy state in which he finds the journal as he takes over as editor.
Just as the time has come for a change of editorship of the journal
itself, so Dr Rhona Brown has decided that the time has come for her to
hand over the role of Reviews Editor. This will be taken over by Dr
Scott Lyall (Napier University, Edinburgh). Dr Brown has been an
outstanding and assiduous Reviews Editor. The task of selecting books
for review, finding reviewers and ensuring that the reviews promised are
actually delivered is one that requires high levels of energy and
activity and Dr Brown has certainly shown both.
The quality of the journal and its significance in the field is
marked not only by the excellent work of Dr Dunnigan and Dr McCulloch in
editing articles, but also by the complementary work of Dr Brown in
ensuring that the reviews that appear are rigorous, fair, timely and add
to critical debate. This is a task she has fulfilled in an exemplary
manner and for this I thank her.
The ASLS, and indeed the world of Scottish literary scholarship, is
in debt to the work of the three editors who demit their
responsibilities. They hand over to Professor Carruthers and Dr Lyall a
healthy enterprise.
Ian Brown