Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary and the Ossian controversy

A study of the influence of the controversy about Macpherson's Ossian poems on Scott's novel The Antiquary

Fingalian topographies: Ossian and the Highland Tour 1760-1805

If Ossian validated the Highland landscape for eighteenth-century tourists, the landscape, in turn, seemed to authenticate poems whose authenticity never ceased to be doubted; but text and topography alike ran the risk of dissolving into insubstantiality. Many tourists cited ‘local tradition’ in order to embroider existing (or to invent new) Fingalian place-names. Ranging over a wide variety of eighteenth-century travel-writers, this article casts new light on the relations between Ossian, travel-writing and Highland topography. It concludes by discussing the ‘fieldwork’ tradition of Ossianic tourism after 1800, which sought out local tradition bearers, rather than attempting to authenticate Macpherson's ‘translations’

Marilyn Speers Butler 1937–2014

No abstract available

Scott’s Reparative Land Ethic

A review essay discussing Susan Oliver\u27s important and convincing book Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), noting Scott\u27s land ethic and active role in managing his estate at Abbotsford and in afforestation, and suggesting that Oliver\u27s book presents a cumulative literary history of Scotland’s ecologies, so that Scott\u27s poetry and novels assume a new relevance for 21st century readers

Philosophical Vagabonds: Pedestrianism, Politics, and Improvement on the Scottish Tour

Discusses John Bristed\u27s facetious, digressive memoir, Anthroplanomenos (1803), about a walking tour through the Highlands of lScotland in 1801 by two young students disguised as American sailors, with little money and no identity papers,” describing their adventures and misadventures as they encountered suspicion, hostility and sometimes surprising kindness; brings out the two travellers’ often-self-contradictory responses to what they saw and experienced; and shows how the tour contributed to their changing political perspective, mirroring the turn away from 1790s radicalism in better-known writers in the same years. An edited version of the 2017 Marilyn Butler Lecture, for the British Association for Romantic Studies

Philosophical vagabonds: Pedestrianism, politics and improvement on the Scottish tour

Discusses John Bristed's "facetious, digressive" memoir, Anthroplanomenos (1803), about a walking tour through the Highlands of lScotland in 1801 by two young students "disguised as American sailors, with little money and no identity papers,” describing their adventures and misadventures as they encountered suspicion, hostility and sometimes surprising kindness; brings out the two travellers’ often-self-contradictory responses to what they saw and experienced; and shows how the tour contributed to their changing political perspective, mirroring the turn away from 1790s radicalism in better-known writers in the same years. An edited version of the 2017 Marilyn Butler Lecture, for the British Association for Romantic Studies

Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism. By Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

No abstract available

‘Co-ainm na taca seo an-uiridh’:Dugald MacNicol’s Caribbean Lament for Argyll

This article examines a Gaelic song written in 1816 in St. Lucia by a Scottish Gaelic-speaking army officer from Argyll, Dugald MacNicol (1791-1844), sketching MacNicol's life and military career in the Caribbean, in the Royal West Indian Rangers and later in the 1st Royals (Royal Scots Regiment), placing the song in relation to other Gaelic poems of emigration and exile, and printing a newly-edited text of MacNicol's song alongside the authors' English translation