CHRISTIANITY IN SCOTTISH LITERATURE
Edited by John Patrick Pazdziora
Published in: Paperback, 340 pages
By: Scottish Literature International, March 2023
Price: £19.95 / €24.95 / $27.95
ISBN 978-1-908980-37-3
This book is available internationally and can be ordered from any bookseller
The experiences of being Christian and living amid a culture shaped by various iterations of Christianity are long-standing concerns of Scottish literature. This volume moves through Scotland’s literary history, from the early medieval era to the twenty-first century, to explore how Christianity has provided Scottish writers with a framework on which to build their manifold literary selves. Walter Scott, Margaret Oliphant and Edwin Morgan are among the writers revisited in this collection to examine the enduring influence of Christian liturgy, language and belief on Scottish fiction, drama and poetry. These fifteen essays offer contrasting, sometimes disharmonious readings of what it means to be Christian and Scottish, and work to illuminate Scottish literature’s complex relationship and interplay with Christianity.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Wrong End of a Telescope (John Patrick Pazdziora)
1. Relic, Text, and Practice in Adomnán of Iona’s Vita Sancti Columbae (Duncan Sneddon)
2. ‘Mater Sanctissima’: Sanctity and Motherhood in the Miracula of St Margaret of Scotland (Claire Harrill)
3. Liturgy and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland: Continuity and Discontinuity (David Jasper)
4. Post-Reformation Developments in Kirk Attitudes to Scottish Theatre (Ian Brown)
5. Eccentrics as Spokespersons for Tobias Smollett on Religion (J. Walter McGinty)
6. A Working-Class Poet from the Eastern Border: Robert Davidson (1778–1855) (Barbara Bell)
7. Walter Scott’s Religious Discourses (J. H. Alexander)
8. ‘The Sermon Pump’: Failed Preachers in George MacDonald’s Fiction (John Patrick Pazdziora)
9. Margaret Oliphant in a Land of Death: Representations of Other-Worlds in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Writing (Rebecca McLean)
10. ‘If Heaven is a’ that man can dream’: Religion and Scottish Poetry of the First World War (Silvia Mergenthal)
11. Approaching God in Scottish Renaissance Poetry (Dominique Delmaire)
12. George Mackay Brown and the Disenchantment of Orkney (Linden Bicket)
13. A Post-Religious Incarnation in Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (Mike Kugler)
14. Edwin Morgan’s Last Things: Eschatology and his Post-Millennial Poetry (James McGonigal)
15. God, War, and the Faeries: Mentoring and Carrying Stream in Writing Poacher’s Pilgrimage (Alastair McIntosh)
Notes on contributors
Index
Biblical References