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James Macpherson, the man behind the myth: Highland clan champion and nouveau riche
Read more: James Macpherson, the man behind the myth: Highland clan champion and nouveau richeThomas Archambaud explores the life and reputation of writer, politician, clan champion and colonial agent James Macpherson.
Dialectics of Improvement: a conversation
Robert Louis Stevenson and Character Creation
Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development, 1660-1750
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 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, 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 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…