Announcements for Literature and Culture of

Nineteenth Century Scotland, Spring 2003

Instructor: Professor Florence Boos

Office Hours: M 6-7 and W 3:30-4:20 p. m.

Phone: 335-0434 (Office)

E-mail: florence-boos@uiowa.edu

Final Take-Home Exam (Essay)

For our final class May 12th at 2:30 p. m., please prepare a six to eight page essay which contrasts and assesses the importance of a central theme, form or motif in at least two of the authors or works we have studied this semester. Your essay should consider specific features of style and design in the works you have chosen. Its conclusion should explain how/whether the topic you have discussed is central to other Scottish literature of the period.

Authors we have read include: early ballad writers, James Boswell, Dr. Johnson, Adam Smith, David Hume, James Hogg, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie, Christian Watt, Robert Louis Stevenson, W. H. Henley, Margaret Oliphant, Janet Hamilton, Ellen Johnston, Mary Macpherson, Elizabeth Campbell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Violet Jacob, Neil Gunn, and Hugh MacDiarmid.

Topics you might discuss include:

  • orality and the ballad tradition
  • the use of Jacobite history
  • Highland and/or Gaelic culture
  • romance in its social setting
  • religion, esp. Calvinist and Presbyterian
  • science in literature
  • the Enlightenment and the "common sense" school
  • Scotland's relation to England
  • industrialism and social change
  • displacement and change in the rural economy
  • mystery and the supernatural
  • social class and its effects
  • Scottish history through song
  • sickness, medicine and therapy
  • gender roles in nineteenth-century Scotland
  • repression and the subconscious
  • outsiders and outcasts
  • irony and social commentary in fiction
  • interior monologue and points of view
  • the use of poetic effects and symbolism in fiction
  • the modernist vernacular tradition in poetry
  • the First World War in Scottish literature
  • love/birth/parenting/friendships in Scottish literature
  • Scottish nationalism in early twentieth-century literature
  • sequence and image in modernist poetry
  • Scots vernacular diction in poetry
  • poetic sequence/masque/epic
  • rural vs. urban cultures
  • substance abuse/drugs/alcohol

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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