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"Lumsden, Alison"
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Walter Scott and the Limits of Language
This text draws on Alison Lumsden's experience to suggest a reading of Scott that highlights his startlingly contemporary approach to theories of language and the creative implications of this within his work.
eBook
The contemporary British novel since 2000
Focuses on the novels published since 2000 by twenty major British novelists The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is in five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It is with reference to each of these novelists in turn that the terms 'realist', 'postmodernist', 'historical' and 'postcolonialist' fiction are introduced, while in the remaining four parts, other novelists are discussed and the meaning of the terms amplified. From the start it is emphasised that these terms and others often mean different things to different novelists, and that the complexity of their novels often obliges us to discuss their work with reference to more than one of the terms. Also discusses the works of: Maggie O'Farrell, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Adam Foulds, Sarah Waters, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Levy, and Aminatta Forna.
eBook
Towards the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry
In spite of a recent re-evaluation of Scott's work there is no scholarly edition of his poetry. This is a crucial lack that distorts our understanding of the nature of poetry in the Romantic period. However, such a scholarly edition in ten volumes is under preparation at the University of Aberdeen under the guidance of those who produced the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. My article examines the questions that have been explored in order to develop a methodology for editing Scott's poetry, the ways in which its creative evolution differs from that of his fiction, and outlines some of the discoveries that have been made along the way.
Journal Article
The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson
This wide-ranging collection is the first to set Robert Louis Stevenson in detailed social, political and literary contexts.
The book takes account of both Stevenson's extraordinary thematic and generic diversity and his geographical range. The chapters explore his relation to late nineteenth-century publishing, psychology, travel, the colonial world, and the emergence of modernism in prose and poetry. Through the pivotal figure of Stevenson, the collection explores how literary publishing and cultural life changed across the second half of the nineteenth century. Stevenson emerges as a complex writer, author both of hugely popular boys' stories and of seminally important adult novels, as well as the literary figure who debated with Henry James the theory of fiction and the nature of realism.
The collection shows how interest in the unconscious and changes in the conception of childhood demand that we re-evaluate our ideas of his writing. Individual essays by international experts trace Stevenson' literary contexts from Scotland to the South Pacific, and show him to be one of the key writers for understanding the growing sense of globalisation and cultural heterogeneity in the late nineteenth century.
Key Features
Sets Stevenson in his literary, scientific and political contextsCovers a broad range of Stevenson's fiction and non-fictionWritten by a team of international scholarsIncludes an authoritative introduction and select bibliography
eBook
A. L. Kennedy
While some critics have attempted to read A. L. Kennedy’s early short stories and novels within paradigms of nationality and gender, most acknowledge that they refuse to settle into these categories. Her pre-2000 fiction has more often been read as concerning itself with isolated individuals and the limits of community and communication. David Borthwick, for example, has said that Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990) is like ‘an early manifesto of her work’ which repeatedly returns to the topic of the ‘psychological vortex of its subjects’ through which ‘the reader must reconstruct the characters’ identities according to an idiosyncratic
Book Chapter
Narrative Continued
In his influential essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ John Barth argues that, confronted by a post-Saussurean crisis in language and a realisation of the limitations of its communicative capacities, the novel reaches a ‘dead end’, signalling ‘the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities’.¹ For many critics Scott’s novels of the 1820s represent a similar dead-end, the beginnings of a slow demise for the Author of Waverley. However, Barth was later to redress his own conclusions in an essay called ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ where he acknowledges that, against all odds, the ‘postmodern’ turn that had
Book Chapter
Last Words
Of all Scott’s fiction his last works, Count Robert of Paris, Reliquiae Trotcosienses and Castle Dangerous have been perceived as the most problematic. Frequently dismissed by critics they have been seen as flawed productions, the consequence of Scott’s late illnesses and intellectual decline. A. O. J. Cockshut, for example, states that Scott’s last texts are simply an act of ‘[labouring] steadily on with the task of covering blank paper with ink’¹ while Christopher Harvie describes them as ‘eminently forgettable projects’.² Catherine Jones sees these novels as a ‘retreat into the formulaic’.³ While recognising that Count Robert is Scott’s ‘most powerful
Book Chapter
Speaking my Language
As has been shown in the previous chapter in Scott’s early narrative poems he searches for a means to recover the past while simultaneously voicing a concern about poetry itself as a medium for locating and reinvigorating it. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in 1814, arguably at the height of his poetic career, he should turn to the newer form of the novel in order to explore the ways in which the past can be recovered and mediated to a modern audience through its discourses.¹ This chapter will explore the ways in which, in his early fiction, Scott simultaneously
Book Chapter