Ossian and Cesarotti: Poems and Translations (original) (raw)
Related papers
Literary Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Club Poetry
2004
This work provides a critical analysis of a neglected yet vital element of Scottish literature in the 18th century, covering the crucial period from the Union of 1707 to the revolutionary turmoil of the 1790s. It examines the literary output of several important clubs in eighteenth-century Scotland in an innovative fashion, offering the first book-length study of the club poetry of Scotland’s most significant eighteenth-century poets, Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns.
The Union of 1707 and the Scottish Enlightenment
Ruch Filozoficzny, 2018
inserted a passage that is known to virtually every student of the Scottish Enlightenment: 'Is it not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government…, is it not strange, I say, that in these Circumstances we shou'd really be the People most distinguish'd for Literature in Europe?' 1 His words can be approached from different perspectives, including the sense of intellectual superiority shared by many Enlightenment thinkers, but they also reflect a notion that the Union of 1707 provided a political framework for serious changes in Scotland that led to the birth of what we know as the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume was not alone in his opinion. William Robertson wrote: 'adopted into a constitution whose genius and laws were more liberal than their own, they [the Scots] have extended their commerce, refined their manners, made improvements in the elegancies of life, and cultivated the arts and sciences'. 2 This stance is echoed by those scholars who stress that, while the intellectual and cultural origins of the Scottish Enlightenment can be traced back as early as the 15 th century, the English-Scottish union of 1707 led to the gradual stabilization of political life as well as economic and social development, creating the conditions for rapid in
The invention of Scottish literature during the long eighteenth century
2001
The Invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century" examines the limited place in the canon traditionally allowed to creative writing in Scotland during this period and the overarching reading of creative impediment applied to it in the light of Scotland's fraught and not easily to be homogenised national history and identity. It interrogates the dominant mode of what it terms the Scottish literary critical tradition and finds this tradition to have many shortcomings as a result of its prioritising of literary and cultural holism. In examining the Scots poetry revival of the eighteenth century the thesis challenges the traditional identification of a populist and beset mode, and finds eighteenth-century poetry in Scots to be actually much more catholic in its literary connections. These more catholic "British" connections are reappraised alongside the distinctively Scottish accents of the poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. The poetry of James Thomson, it is also argued, fits more easily into a heterogeneous Scottish identity than is sometimes thought and the work of Thomson is connected with the poets in Scots to show a network of influence and allegiance which is more coherent than has been traditionally allowed. Similarly, the primitivist agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment in creative literature is examined to demonstrate the way in which this provides license for reclaiming elements of the historically fraught or "backward" Scottish identity (thus an essentially conservative, patriotic element within the Scottish Enlightenment cultural voice is emphasised). Also, with the writers of poetry in Scots, as well as with Thomson, and with those whose work comes under the intellectual sponsorship of Enlightenment primitivism such as Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson, James Beattie and others we chart a movement from the age of Augustanism and neoclassicism to that of sensibility and proto-Romanticism. From Bums's work to that of Walter Scott, John Galt and James Hogg we highlight Scottish writers making creative capital from the difficult and fractured Scottish identity and seeing this identity as, in part, reflecting cultural tensions and fractures which are more widely coined furth of their own country. The connecting threads of the thesis are those narratives in Scottish literature of the period which show the retrieval and analysis of seemingly lost or receding elements of Scottish identity. Creative innovation and re-energisation rather than surrender and loss are what the thesis finally diagnoses in Scottish literature of the long eighteenth century. Contents. Introduction. pp. 1-4. Chapter One. The Modern Making of the Scottish Literary Canon and the Problem of the Long Eighteenth Century pp. 5-47. Chapter Two. "Fashion of Words and Wit may Change, /And Rob in part their fame ": Allan Ramsay and the Formation of Poetry in Scots in the Early Eighteenth Century pp. 48-89. Chapter Three. "My trembling muse your honour does address/That its a bold attempt most humbly I confess ": James Thomson and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literary Identity pp. 90-119. Chapter Four. " 'Mang men, wae's-heart! we aft en find/The brawest dress want peace of mind ": Robert Fergusson and High Scots Cultural Complaint pp. 120-164. Chapter Five. "Rugged her soil, and rugged was her shore, /yet she gained a name/That stands unrivall'd in the rolls of fame ": The Anti-Canon of the Scottish Enlightenment pp. 165-220. Chapter Six. Robert Burns: "Doing honour to our language, our nation and our species. " pp. 221-276. Chapter Seven. "Circumstances which the Author has not been able to persuade himself to retract or cancel ": The Scottish Novel in the Early Nineteenth Century pp. 277-319. Conclusion. pp. 320-322. Bibliography. pp. 323-337. ' An earlier version of a small part of the material in this chapter appeared as "The Construction of the Scottish Critical Tradition" in Neil McMillan and Kirsten Stirling (eds), Odd Alliances (Glasgow, 1999), pp. 52-65.
Poems in the Scots Register, 1650-1800
The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, 2021
This chapter provides a survey of poems written in the Scots register, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and concluding at the start of the nineteenth. Major and minor Scots poetry is assessed, with attention to formal and thematic continuities across the period. In particular, the Scots triumvirate of Allan Ramsay/Robert Fergusson/Robert Burns is examined in depth.
For "the PROSPERITY OF SCOTLAND": Mediating National Improvement in the Scots Magazine, 1739-49
Studies in Scottish Literature, 2013
In a recent article on the Scottish version of the Tatler, Hamish Mathison observes: "From the first, the newspaper press in Scotland and commentators upon it associated the printing of newspapers with the status and self-understanding of the nation itself." 1 Mathison illustrates this by referring to the print factionalism identified by James Watson, proprietor of the Edinburgh Gazette and Edinburgh Courant, and its national political equivalent noted by George Chalmers, an early historian of the Scottish periodical press. Mathison's insights on the close relationship between an intensely self-reflexive periodical print culture in early eighteenth-century Scotland and the nation's wider aspirations for a distinctive cultural identity in the wake of the Union settlement are joined by important new work from Leith Davis, Warren McDougall and Stephen W. Brown that frame Watson's multifarious role in encouraging the Scottish publishing market to take an active part in the country's struggle for autonomy. Davis argues that his pioneering Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1706-11) "uses the imaginative space of the miscellany to bring readers of different tastes and interests together to promote the cause of Scotland at a time during which the nation's very existence was under threat," and sees the Collection as promoting "Scottish independence through encouraging readers to recognize the uniqueness of Scottish identity." 3 McDougall makes a complementary case for Watson's influential efforts to promote
The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature
2006
The processes of geographical change here explained are apparent, for the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century respectively, in the 'Old' and New statistical accounts of Scotland, works which amount to national geographical self-portraits. Both are part, however, of a longer-run tradition of geographical enquiry in Scotland. Geographical descriptions of the nation, only partially or never realised, were undertaken in 1708, 1721-44, 1757 and 1781. The particular mapping project that was the Military Survey of Scotland (1747-54), an exercise in political control after Culloden, was followed by the work of estate surveyors and, in turn, by maps and plans of farms and new policies as the rhetoric of Improvement became inscribed on the land. In the cities especially, a new type of Scot emerged, the self-styled 'private teacher of geography': men like Robert Darling, who, in Edinburgh's Ramsay's Land in 1776 and again in 1793-4, 'teacheth Youth Writing, Book-keeping, Mathematics and geography, and Gentlemen to Measure and Plan their own estates'. Ebenezer MacFait, another such in late Enlightenment Edinburgh, taught geography to Walter Scott. Robert Burns took what he termed 'My knowledge of ancient story' from geography books, including the Brechin-born William Guthrie's Geographical Grammar, first published in 1770. Geography was taught in the universities: by mathematicians like Colin MacLaurin, by natural philosophers like Thomas Reid and by natural historians like Robert Jameson. If, then, we can locate geography in the Scottish Enlightenment, it is also possible to see the Enlightenment as both concerned with matters of geography-with the cultural status of the Highlands, with potato yields and with soil chemistry, for example-and itself geographically different. In Glasgow, for example, the Enlightenment had its own distinctive character based on the city's industrial and American-oriented commercial growth, the dynamism of the evangelicals and the status of the merchant classes. In Aberdeen, by contrast, the Enlightenment was distinguished by the town's European outlook, apparent both in philosophical concerns and in the town's trading links, by explicit interests in rhetoric and the Scots language and by the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and his circle. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scotland's geographical self-awareness was furthered by the work of formal survey projects: the Ordnance Survey with its hesitant beginnings in Scotland in 1809; the Geological Survey of the northwest Highlands between 1883 and 1907; the British-wide Linguistic and Ethnological Surveys of the 1880s and 1892-9 respectively, and the 1907 Pigmentation Survey, which aimed to document the racial make-up of the nation by measuring head shape and skin colour. Individual Scots at home and overseas likewise promoted the geographical sciences as a contribution to Empire: John Murray on HMS Challenger, W. S. Bruce on the Scotia in the 1902-4 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, and, from his Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, Patrick Geddes emphasised geography as a means to local knowledge, national understanding and global citizenship.
World Journal of English Language, 2023
Numerous studies have investigated the concept of the nation and Scottish identity in the prose fiction of Sir Walter Scott. These studies have traditionally highlighted Scott's role in reshaping public perceptions of the Scottish Highlands, their culture, and the suffering of the Highlanders under the British Empire, through his detailed knowledge of Scottish history and culture. However, it is essential to reconsider this issue in light of recent historical and political developments in Scotland after Brexit and the calls for independence by various Scottish thinkers, writers, and political leaders, aiming to join the European Union. This study revisits Scott's concept of the Scottish nation and identity in his two texts,-The Highland Widow‖ and-The Two Drovers‖. The findings suggest that the nationalist sentiment in Scott's writings is relevant to the social and political changes occurring in Scotland, Europe, and globally. It can be argued that much of the contemporary discourse on Scottish independence can be traced back to Scott's works, indicating a recurring historical pattern. Scott expressed concern for the loss of Scottish national identity and the right of self-determination. His texts vividly demonstrate the interconnection of past and present events, embodying both historical and contemporary perspectives.