Literature of Scotland: The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century

ISBN-13: 9780333666647 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 408 str.

Roderick Watson

Opis

This second edition of one of the most comprehensive accounts of Scottish life and literature now focuses on Medieval to Victorian times, exploring the growth of the idea of a nation from the early ballads and oral tradition to the achievement of Burns, Scott and Carlyle. The modern literature which followed is discussed in the companion volume.

Spis treści

Preface.- Acknowledgements.- Map of Scotland.- Introduction: Renewals, Revivals and Revisions.- The Beginnings of Scotland: Two Cultures.- The Fifteenth Century: The Flowering.- The Sixteenth Century: John the Commonweill.- The Seventeenth Century: Crown and Covenant, The Ballads.- The Eighteenth Century: New Athenians and the Doric.- The Nineteenth Century: History, Industry, Sentiment.- Chronological Table.- Further Reading.- Index.

O autorze

RODERICK WATSON is Professor of English at the University of Stirling, UK, and Director of the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies.

Blurb

Critics hailed the first edition of The Literature of Scotland as one of the most comprehensive and fascinatingly readable accounts of Scottish literature in all three of the country's languages - Gaelic, Scots and English. In this extensively revised and expanded new edition, Roderick Watson traces the lives and works of Scottish writers in a beautiful and rugged country that has been divided by political and religious conflict but united, too, by a democratic and egalitarian ideal of nationhood.

The Literature of Scotland: The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century follows the story from Barbour to John Davidson, exploring the growth of the idea of a nation from the flowering of the Makars to the early ballads and the oral tradition; from courtly verse to the prose of the Reformation and the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment; from Duncan Bàn Macintyre and the great Gaelic poets to the achievement of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, J. M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Each writer is placed in their historical, critical and cultural contexts, and the volume also provides a helpful Further Reading section and chronological timeline, making this the essential guide to Scottish literary history. The literature which followed after the Victorian period is discussed in the companion volume Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century.