• A black and white photograph of Hermann Gross holding a metalworking tool, with an in-progress sculpture before him.

Dialectics of Improvement: a conversation

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.

Walter Scott the “mighty minstrel” and Marmion

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…

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-2017

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…

Hamish Henderson

Hamish Henderson and our Historical Moment

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…

George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

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…

An unfinished masterpiece by Robert Louis Stevenson

By Gillian Hughes Many of Stevenson’s longer works of fiction might be characterised as historical novels: in Weir of Hermiston Stevenson excavates Edinburgh’s Golden Age, that of Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg, and also its surviving physical traces in the…

Gaelic Satire and 18th Century Highland History

The benefit of studying Gaelic poetry in conjunction with conventional documentary sources to obtain a fuller understanding of the past is illustrated in Ellen L. Beard’s article in Northern Scotland, Volume 8.1. She presents newly-compiled information and perspectives on two…