• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.
A statue of Robert Burns

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,…

Stands Scottish Literature Where It Did? Revisiting Devolution

It’s been fifteen years since the last fat volume of essays on contemporary Scottish writing. Only a blink of historical time, but it’s been quite an eventful period. When the chapters of Berthold Schoene’s brilliant Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature were being written, both the country and its debates looked rather different.

Walter Scott’s Seven Deadly Tales

by Daniel Cook Still revered as one of the world’s great historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott kept coming back to the supernatural, the eerie, and the macabre. Some of the novels even include extractable tales of terror: ‘The Fortunes of…

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.