Spring 2003
Spring 2003
In this course we will study the fiction, poetry, and social criticism of Scottish authors from the late eighteenth though the early twentieth century in the context of contemporary Scottish life--especially its uneasy neo-colonial relationship with its more prosperous southern neighbor, its specific traditions of language and folklore, its "sublime," rugged scenery, and its remote Highland culture. We will also give careful attention to the great revival of painting and the decorative arts in late nineteenth-century Scotland; to the influence of French culture on Scottish life; to the development of Scots ballads; to the effects of the industrial revolution on Glaswegian and urban Scottish writings; to gender relations; and to contemporary and later debates over the existence of a separate Scots literary tradition.
Authors whose work we will sample include James Boswell, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Nairn, James Hogg, Thomas Carlyle, Janet Hamilton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant, Violet Jacob, Helen Carmichael, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. In making these choices, I have tried to balance a sense of the unique aspects of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scottish culture with recognition of the ways in which it both contributed to and was subsumed into the wider culture of the British Isles.
Attendance will be required, for much of class time will be devoted to discussion, sometimes conducted in small groups. Students will also submit suggestions for discussion and short essays to the class discussion page. I will also ask students to prepare one presentation on a topic of Scottish interest, and to write a six-page paper based on library research and a final take-home examination.
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Copyright 2003, Florence S. Boos.
TWIST, University Libraries, The University of Iowa.
Image: "Glencoe," Horatio McCulloch, 1864.
Background: Gordon tartan
URL: http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/scot/index.html