By James Bailey ‘I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends’, wrote Spark in her 1992 autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. ‘The former outweigh the latter in terms of quantity’, she added. Spark wasn’t exaggerating; while the author was…
‘How do you do it? I am dazzled’, enthused Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Muriel Spark in 1960. Spark’s latest novel, The Bachelors, was hot off the press, and this, Waugh told her, was ‘the cleverest and most elegant…
Gerard Lee McKeever’s new book Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831 is published this month in the ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism’ series. To mark the occasion, Dr McKeever spoke to series co-editor Professor Penny Fielding.
Audrey Murfin explores Robert Louis Stevenson and his methods of Character Creation
By Murray Pittock My book is a study of the Enlightenment in Edinburgh like no other. Using data and models provided by urban innovation and Smart City theory, it pinpoints the distinctive features that made Enlightenment in the Scottish capital possible.…
Walter Scott’s poetry dominated the early years of the nineteenth century but has subsequently fallen into relative obscurity. The first scholarly edition of Marmion (1808), the second of Scott’s grand historical narrative poems, has recently been published and sets out…
By Robert Morrison An extract from Romanticism, Volume 23.3, October 2017 1817 was a remarkable year for British Romanticism John Keats published his first volume of Poems. Thomas Moore produced Lalla Rookh, Percy Shelley Laon and Cythna, Felicia Hemans Modern…
What’s the artist for in modern Scotland? Curating our accumulated history? Envisioning our possible and impossible futures? Diagnosing the ills of our present and prescribing treatment for the body politic? Showing us who we are, or who we ought to…
What do you imagine when you think about great Catholic art? Perhaps you call to mind the gilded pages of illuminated medieval manuscripts and the glories of Renaissance painting and sculpture. Maybe you recall more recent cinematic masterpieces, such as…