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Home / Publications / Books / Free Downloads / Our Multiform, Our Infinite Scotland

Our Multiform, Our Infinite Scotland

OUR MULTIFORM, OUR INFINITE SCOTLAND

Scottish Literature as “Scottish”, “English” and “World” Literature

Ian Brown

Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Glasgow 2012.
Published in: PDF.


So much are the characters of Jekyll and Hyde absorbed into the imaginations of readers and audiences worldwide that it is sometimes a surprise to be reminded that they are the literary creation of a Scot. In effect, Stevenson’s Scottishness becomes airbrushed from the picture almost in proportion as his work has become perceived as part of English literature […] This paper considers the specifics of why such a Scottish literary text, one deeply concerned as we shall see with issues that typify aspects of Scottish culture and literature, should have become so cosmopolitan in its impact and influence. In doing so it will consider other Scottish writers and texts whose trajectory reflects that of Jekyll and Hyde in becoming landmarks of English and world literature and explore specifics of Scottish history, politics and culture that may explain why they have become central elements in “English literature”.

Ian Brown is Professor of Drama at Kingston University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

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Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

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