The ballads of <i>Tam Lin</i> and <i>Thomas the Rhymer</i>: transformations and transcriptions

Fantasy, in the shape of folk and fairy tale is the oldest and the first literary genre in Scotland, as in almost any society. (Manlove, 2003) Such stories would originally have been told orally. Two of these fairy tales appear in the fifteenth century border ballads of “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer”, and seem unique to Scotland, not least because of their debt to native fairy lore. Novelistic retelling of such traditional material became more common in the twentieth century and this, arguably, could be considered the twentieth century’s unique contribution to the telling of traditional tales. This paper explores the question of why these particular ballads should exert such a strong appeal for modern children’s writers, and how such transformations and translations might be considered modern–day variations, upholding the ballad tradition. The exemplar texts include Liz Lochhead’s Tam Lin’s Lady as well as a selection of novels for young adults which use one or both of these ballads as their source material. The paper considers how the material in both its original and transformed aspects serves important cultural functions by initiating children into facets of a social heritage and by transmitting many of a culture’s central values and assumptions as well as a body of shared allusions and experiences, ensuring that ballads can still have a significant impact on today’s young readers

Singing in a new world: Scotland - hopeless schizophrenic or cosmopolitan post nation?

Rival views of Scotland at the beginning of the twenty-first century see the nation as either, hopelessly schizophrenic, mired in its own bedevilled tartanry and forever salvaging the present through historic erasure or as a cosmopolitan postnation at ease with its contradictory legacies and able to tap its inherent multiplicities for a contemporary self image. These contentions are being interrogated in public debates and political contexts as well as in literature in Scotland. The process of re-imagining or re-visioning Scotland began much earlier than 1999 when the Scottish Parliament, last adjourned in 1707, was reconvened. Contemporary authors have long been reconsidering issues of identity and how this could and should be represented in their writing. This paper will examine how the underlying forces of insistent Scottish identity-making now seem to be moving in the direction of synthesis rather than fragmentation within literature, permitting multiple perspectives and a plurality of approaches through different genres, recognising other people’s rights to perceive or imagine Scotland differently. Anne Forbes’ novels Dragonfire,(2006) The Wings of Ruksh (2007) and The Underground City (2008), fully post-modern fantasy novels, will be used as examples of ‘fusion’ texts introducing an optimistic new notion of ‘belonging’ transcending the cultural fatalism of the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’ hypothesis and building positively on the politics of difference. They represent a form of literary cosmopolitanism entirely consonant with the way Scottish society currently aspires to progress, offering the right set of circumstances for developing new forms of syncretistic myth-making and storytelling across and between communities

Reporting the Irish Famine in America: Images of Suffering Ireland in the American Press, 1845-1848

This chapter is a study of American newspaper reporting on the Great Irish Famine. The study examines six master narratives that constrained the image of Ireland and the Irish people presented to American readers. Those narrative constraints predisposed Americans to respond with hostility when Irish Famine refugees began to arrive in the United States

“Above all Greek, above all Roman Fame”: Classical Rhetoric in America during the Colonial and Early National Periods

The broad and profound influence of classical rhetoric in early America can be observed in both the academic study of that ancient discipline, and in the practical approaches to persuasion adopted by orators and writers in the colonial period, and during the early republic. Classical theoretical treatises on rhetoric enjoyed wide authority both in college curricula and in popular treatments of the art. Classical orators were imitated as models of republican virtue and oratorical style. Indeed, virtually every dimension of the political life of early Ameria bears the imprint of a classical conception of public discourse. This essay marks the various specific aspects of the reception and influence of the classical rhetorical tradition in the learning, speaking and writing of Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

The Rhetoric(s) of St. Augustine\u27s Confessions

In this essay, I offer a sympathetic reading of the rhetoric(s) of Augustine’s Confessions. First, as a historian of rhetoric I am interested in what Augustine’s narrative can tell us about the theory and practice of rhetoric in the late classical period and the early Christian era. From this perspective, I am interested in exploring what Augustine discloses about the rhetoric he learned in the provincial Roman schools, and taught at Carthage, Rome, and Milan. Second, I am interested in Augustine’s own work on rhetoric, especially his De Doctrina Christiana, most of which he composed during the period right before he began the Confessions. In particular, I am interested in how the rhetorical ethics that emerges from Augustine’s formal treatment of Biblical exegesis and preaching, and which distinguishes Augustine’s rhetoric from that of his classical predecessors, can illuminate our interpretation of the Confessions. Finally, I am interested in exploring how the Confessions itself works as a rhetorical text— that is, as a discourse addressed to an audience for the purpose of influence. In particular, I am interested in exploring the specific pastoral functions served by Augustine’s narrative

Addressing the Bard: Learning Ideas

The Scottish Poetry Library has published a new, provocative and exciting anthology of Burns poems, launched in the Year of Homecoming and of Burns’s 250th anniversary. What makes this anthology different is that twelve contemporary poets have been asked to select one of Burns’s poems and to respond to it. The result is an eclectic collection with some unexpected choices and responses that enlighten, challenge and amuse us. All of the response poems provide insight into Burns’s original work and some may have a more direct resonance with modern readers. In addition to the book itself, these supporting resources are being provided on the Learning and Teaching Scotland website. The material has been developed by Liz Niven, poet, writer, and Scots-language educator, and Maureen Farrell, an English teacher and now teacher educator from the University of Glasgow

Complexity bounds on supermesh construction for quasi-uniform meshes

Projecting fields between different meshes commonly arises in computational physics. This operation requires a supermesh construction and its computational cost is proportional to the number of cells of the supermesh $n$. Given any two quasi-uniform meshes of $n_A$ and $n_B$ cells respectively, we show under standard assumptions that n is proportional to $n_A + n_B$. This result substantially improves on the best currently available upper bound on $n$ and is fundamental for the analysis of algorithms that use supermeshes

Replicability of data collected for empirical estimation of relative pollen productivity

The effects of repeated survey and fieldwork timing on data derived from a recently proposed standard field methodology for empirical estimation of relative pollen productivity (RPP) have been tested. Seasonal variations in vegetation and associated pollen assemblages were studied in three contrasting cultural habitat types; semi-natural ancient woodlands, lowland heaths, and unimproved, traditionally managed hay meadows. Results show that in woodlands and heathlands the standard method generates vegetation data with a reasonable degree of similarity throughout the field season, though in some instances additional recording of woodland canopy cover should be undertaken, and differences were greater for woodland understorey taxa than for arboreal taxa. Large differences in vegetation cover were observed over the field season in the grassland community, and matching the phenological timing of surveys within and between studies is clearly important if RPP estimates from these sites are to be comparable. Pollen assemblages from closely co-located moss polsters collected on different visits are shown to be variable in all communities, to a greater degree than can be explained by the sampling error associated with pollen counting, and further study of moss polsters as pollen traps is recommended

Deflation for semismooth equations

Variational inequalities can in general support distinct solutions. In this paper we study an algorithm for computing distinct solutions of a variational inequality, without varying the initial guess supplied to the solver. The central idea is the combination of a semismooth Newton method with a deflation operator that eliminates known solutions from consideration. Given one root of a semismooth residual, deflation constructs a new problem for which a semismooth Newton method will not converge to the known root, even from the same initial guess. This enables the discovery of other roots. We prove the effectiveness of the deflation technique under the same assumptions that guarantee locally superlinear convergence of a semismooth Newton method. We demonstrate its utility on various finite- and infinite-dimensional examples drawn from constrained optimization, game theory, economics and solid mechanics.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figure