Edinburgh Monuments, the Literary Canon, and Cultural Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective

Building on comparative studies of the memory landscapes of cities and monuments, describes three different monument series in Edinburgh, the Canongate Wall at the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood, the flagstone quotations in Makar\u27s Court near the Writers\u27 Museum, and the grouped herms in the Edinburgh Business Park; discusses how the authors included in each series were selected and how each relates to the formal and informal Scottish literary canon; and briefly indicates what comparative scholarship suggests about the relation of such monuments to the development of cultural nationalism

Literature and music: introduction

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Hitler on the Ballachulish Beat: The Plays of C. P. Taylor

Although seven of his plays were performed at the 1992 Edinburgh International Festival, the Scottish playwright C.P. Taylor (1929-81) is much less well-known than some of this younger colleagues. This is particularly unfortunate as C.P. Taylor’s thematic concerns, and the dramatic vocabulary he employs to voice them, are unique in their contemporary Scottish context, albeit strongly indebted to European, specifically German, Modernism. The article will first provide a brief survey of C.P. Taylor’s life and writing career, focussing on his Jewish background (which informs, for example, such plays as Walter and The Black and White Minstrels), and on the conditions of writing in exile (as a Scot in England). The second part will consist of a detailed, comparative examination of three plays, namely, Bread and Butter, The Ballachulish Beat, and Good. In spite of their considerable differences —Bread and Butter explores the lives of two young Jewish couples in Glasgow, The Ballachullish Beat follows the career of a rock band, and Good discusses the question of euthanasia before the sinister background of 1930s Germany —all three plays are concerned with the responses of individuals to the pressures, but also the allure, of various kinds of totalitarianism. In addition, all three plays associate totalitarianism with music, as a pre- or non- rational form of experience; as a consequence, the role of music in these plays, both as a theme and as a dramatic technique, will have to be explored

James Robertson, The Fanatic (2000)

Suggests that Robertson\u27s first novel, chiefly concerned with 17th century Scotland, already shows the complex intertextual relationships with earlier Scottish works by Scott, Hogg, and Stevenson that marks his subsequent writing, and comments particularly on its question What happens later?, in relation to the Scottish vote for political devolution in May 1997

“Polarities within an Entity”: The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankin’s The Falls (2001)

The cultural profile of the literary haut lieu that is Edinburgh is marked by a strong interest in the violent history of the city, specifically, in its legacy of crime. This legacy is preserved in a variety of material and immaterial archives, including a substantial body of fictional and non-fictional literature, and inscribed in the Edinburgh cityscape. It is also commodified so as to attract the international tourist trade. Using as its prime example Ian Rankin’s 2001 Rebus novel The Falls, this paper sketches the cultural history of one notorious criminal case, that of William Burke and William Hare. In particular, it discusses the spatio-temporal referentiality of texts about Burke and Hare and situates them in the wider context of the Scottish literary tradition