Roland Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse: Translating Again, Writing Again
Patrick ffrench and Timothy Mathews discuss the special issue of CounterText they've recently edited.
Threads that Bind: Women and their Clothing in Sixteenth-Century Scotland
by Cathryn Spence and Cordelia Beattie The saying goes, ‘Clothes make the man’, but in early modern Scotland, many women would have considered clothing to be a central part of their identity. According to early modern legal treatises, married women…
Excavating a lost classic: Interview with Le Retour director, Daniel Goldenberg
by Mani Sharpe and Daniel Goldenberg Read the original interview in French Shot in 1959, Le Retour is a short film directed by Daniel Goldenberg, in collaboration with the ex-paratrooper, Yann le Masson, who was responsible for cinematography, alongside Georges…
Scottish Education and Society Since 1945
by Lindsay Paterson Scottish education has often been celebrated as an international pioneer in many things – the opportunity to provide schooling for everyone in the sixteenth-century Reformation, resulting in widespread literacy that provided the social basis for the eighteenth-century…
Adam Smith and Scotland in the Age of Enlightenment
by Craig Smith 2023 is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith. Smith is one of the very few writers whose name is genuinely famous all over the world. He is known as the father of economics, the…
Making the News – A History of Scottish Newspapers
by Hamish Fraser With the readership of daily newspapers at the present day falling drastically and local newspapers struggling to survive, a study of Scottish newspapers in their heyday is timely. In the century after 1850, it was from newspapers…
Q&A with Leandro Losada on ‘Machiavelli in the Spanish-Speaking Atlantic World’
by Leandro Losada Tell us a bit about your book. Machiavelli in the Spanish-Speaking Atlantic World, 1880-1940 pursues two comparative approaches. One is the history of liberal and anti-liberal political thinking. The other is the reception of Machiavelli’s works in…
5 lesser-known examples of late-colonial French cinema
by Mani King Sharpe In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a spate of ‘late-colonial’ French films were made that thematised the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), as it was occurring. Some of these films, for example, Muriel (Resnais, 1963),…
Robert Burns’s Memory: A Matter of State
by Paul Malgrati Every year, on 25 January, Burns Night offers a remarkable opportunity for Scottish political parties to issue a statement about the Scottish nation, its identity, and its situation. Last year, in 2022, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon,…