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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
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
Lost in Translation
The Heart of Mid-Lothian emerges as a kind of crisis in Scott’s writing. In Graham McMaster’s schema, it is the point where his optimism ends and his disillusionment begins.¹ More pertinent to this discussion, however, it can be seen as the moment where the question of language assumes a new urgency for the Author of Waverley, his focus moving from the question of how to capture the ‘ultimate referent’ of the past to one of how the novelist may escape the prison house of language wrought by it. As a result the novels of the 1820s see a significant shift
Book Chapter
Introduction
In the revised version of the ‘General Introduction’ to the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (EEWN) the editor-in-chief, David Hewitt, contemplates what it has achieved and what it has taught us about Scott. He comments:
A surprising amount of what was once thought loose or unidiomatic has turned out to be textual corruption. Many words which were changed as the holograph texts were converted into print have been recognised as dialectical, period or technical terms wholly appropriate to their literary context. The mistakes in foreign languages, in Latin, and in Gaelic found in the early printed texts are usually
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