Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Traditional Literatures
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This collection of essays explores the historical importance and imaginative richness of Scotland’s extensive contribution to modes of traditional culture and expression: ballads, tales and storytelling, and song. Its underlying aim is to bring about a more dynamic and inclusive understanding of Scottish culture. Rooted in literary history and both comparative and interdisciplinary in scope, the volume covers the key aspects and genres of traditional literature, including the Gaelic tradition, from the medieval period to the present.
Key theoretical and conceptual issues raised by the historical analysis of Scotland’s rich store of ballad, song, and folk narrative are discussed in separate chapters. The volume also explores why and how Scottish literary writers have been inspired by traditional genres, modes, and motifs, and the intermingling of folk and literary traditions in writers such as Burns, Scott, and Hogg. It also uncovers the folkloric and mythopoetic materials of early Scottish literature, and the vitality of neglected aspects of Scottish popular culture.
Key Features
Explores the cultural meanings of 'tradition' and 'living tradition' and the roles of historical and modern informants, storytellers, and singersExamines the relationship between the oral and the literary in Scots, Gaelic, and EnglishDraws on a wide range of examples including: Francis J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads; The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection; the waulking song; Gaelic folktale; the traditions of Fionn mac Cumhail; the songs of Anna Gordon Brown; ballads from Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and James Hogg's Jacobite Relics; and material from George Campbell Hay, Sorley Maclean and Hamish HendersonGuides readers through some of the key theoretical and conceptual issues in the fieldInclusive of Gaelic, Scots and English traditionsBroad historical coverage from late medieval to the contemporary
Sarah M. Dunnigan is senior lecturer in English Literature at Edinburgh University. Her research interests include medieval and early modern Scottish literature, Scottish women’s writing, fairy tales, and children’s literature. Suzanne Gilbert, senior lecturer in English at Stirling University, publishes on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish literature, ballads, and chapbooks. She and Ian Duncan are general editors of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of The Collected Works of James Hogg (Edinburgh University Press), for which she co-edited Queen Hynde (1998) and edited The Mountain Bard (2007). Her edition of Hogg’s Scottish Pastorals for the series is forthcoming.