Plenary Lectures

 
Robert Crawford (University of St Andrews)
“America’s Bard”

Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St Andrews. His books of poetry include A Scottish Assembly (Chatto, 1990), Sharawaggi (Polygon, 1990), The Tip of My Tongue (Cape, 2003) and Selected Poems (Cape, 2005). Four of his collections have been P

oetry Book Society Recommendations and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards. With Simon Armitage he edited The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998) and with Mick Imlah The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000). A founding editor of the magazine Verse, he has served as a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Poetry Competition, and other awards. In 2004 he delivered the Smithies Lectures at Balliol College, Oxford. Robert Crawford's critical books include The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (OUP, 1987), Identifying Poets (EUP, 1993), Devolving English Literature (Second Edition, EUP, 2000), and The Modern Poet (OUP, 2001). He has also edited collections such as Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (EUP, 1997), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (CUP, 1998), and Heaven-Taught Fergusson (Tuckwell, 2003), The Book of St Andrews (Polygon, 2005), and Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (forthcoming from OUP, 2006).

Cairns Craig (University of Aberdeen)
“Scottish Aesthetics and the Landscape of Memory”

Cairns Craig is Professor of Scottish and Modern Literature in the School of Language and Literature at Aberdeen, where he is Director of the second phase of the AHRC-funded Centre of Irish and Scottish Studies (2006-10) and of the University’s Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies. He rejoined the University of Aberdeen in 2005, having been a lecturer here in the 1970s, after a long career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Head of the English Department (1997-2003), as well as Director for the Centre for the History of Ideas in Scotland.

Cairns Craig has published widely on Scottish and modern literature, including Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1982), Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (1996) and The Modern Scottish Novel (1999). His most recent book is on Iain Banks’s Complicity (2002).

Luke Gibbons (University of Notre Dame)
“‘A Wandering Passion for a Fugitive Object:’ Romanticism and the Irish Sublime”

Luke Gibbons is Keough Family Chair in Irish Studies, Professor of English, and Concurrent Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame. The Director of Graduate Studies for the Keough Institute, his interests range from film and literature to the visual arts, questions of aesthetics, politics and cultural history, and contemporary debates on post-colonialism. His most recent books are Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonialism and Irish Culture (2004) and Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime 1750-1850 (2003). Other books include The Quiet Man (2003), Transformations in Irish Culture (1996), and (with Kevin Rockett and John Hill) Cinema in Ireland (1988), the first academic study of Irish cinema. He is currently preparing books for publication on James Joyce, modernism and memory and Romanticism and the Enlightenment in Ireland. Luke Gibbons was a contributing editor to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) and he has also co-edited several important interventions in cultural and political debates, most recently (with Peadar Kirby and Michael Cronin) Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (2002) and (with Dudley Andrew) The Theatre of Irish Cinema (2002). He is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation and a consulting editor of Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh)
“Literary Friendship and Lateral Thinking”

The Scottish Enlightenment offers striking examples of literary friendship, and some significant writing about its nature. The lecture will consider their translated manifestations in American Romanticism, and explore the idea of friendship as a possible model for transatlantic comparison.

Susan Manning is Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust, and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels and the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of the Works of James Hogg. She is an editor of the forthcoming three-volume Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of the Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic periods and in Scottish-American literary relations, the subjects of her books The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (CUP, 1990) and Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Palgrave, 2002). She has edited the works of Henry Mackenzie, including a new edition of Julia de Roubigné, Walter Scott's Quentin Durward, Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. Susan Manning is a Board Member and Past President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, and co-ordinates the Carnegie funded STAR (Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations) initiative. Ongoing research projects include a new EUP series on Transatlantic Literatures, a major study of Character, and the development of methodologies for transatlantic comparison.

Murray Pittock (University of Manchester)
“Fratriotism: Empire and its Limits in the Scottish and Irish Imagination”

‘Fratriotism’ is the adoption of colonized nations and cultures as a means of expressing reservations concerning the nature and development of empire, a mindset arising from conflicting loyalties generated by inclusion in a state with which one does not fully identify. Scottish and Irish writers and public figures of the long eighteenth century were particularly given to adopting the national causes of other countries with a passion and vigour which might readily be interpreted as reflecting on the situation of their own. Fratriotism affects not only the British but also the Spanish empire, where many expatriate Scots and Irish (often identified with Native Americans in British propaganda) took an active role in the liberation of Peru and New Spain. Fratriotism in these contexts was the performance of nationality displaced into a reading of the other as the unachievable self: cultural alterity as a response to political defeat, expressed through what Robert Darnton, following Clifford Geertz, terms ‘social dimensions of meaning’. Edmund Burke’s and Richard Sheridan’s view of India; Boswell’s of Corsica; Byron’s of Albania and Greece; Thomas Cochrane’s of Latin America; Lyon Mackenzie’s of Canada; O’Higgin’s of Chile and the success of figures as diverse as General Allan MacLean in North America and Colonel Robert Pigott in Venezuela in raising Native American troops: all are potential instances of fratriotism, the performance for the other of what one cannot do for oneself. Irish Jacobite exiles campaigned for Indian land rights; United Irish volunteers fought for Bolivar’s cause; even Boswell, enthusiastic for the patriot ‘highlanders’ of his favourite island, teased that Corsica was to be reclaimed as a kingdom for Charles Edward Stuart. Robert Louis Stevenson’s defence of the islanders of Samoa, Irish volunteers who fought for the Boers and the election of the Irish nationalist Annie Besant to the presidency of Congress in India in 1919 are all later examples of the phenomenon.

Murray Pittock is Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was British Academy Chatterton Lecturer in Poetry in 2002, and his topic, 'Robert Burns and British Poetry,' now forms part of a project on Robert Burns and Global Culture for 2009, the 250th anniversary of the poet's death. Murray has published prominent work in Scottish and Irish Studies, including most recently a research edition of James Hogg’s The Jacobite Relics of Scotland in two volumes (2002-3), A New History of Scotland (2003), Scottish Nationality (2001) and Celtic Identity and the British Image (1999). Forthcoming work includes 'The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature' (co-editor), 'The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe' and books on James Boswell and on Scotland since 1960, as well as longer studies on Scottish and Irish Romanticism. Murray sits on the editorial committees of several editions and journals and is a trustee of the Jacobite Studies Trust.

David Simpson (University of California, Davis)
“‘Which is the Merchant Here, and Which the Jew?’: Walter Scott's Foreigners”

Scott's novels can seem comfortable enough in explaining the modern union of England and Scotland as the happy outcome of contiguity and commerce; but his novels of the crusades depict a more turbulent and miscellaneous society with no preestablished bases for historically progressive subcultural alliances to emerge or subsist. Models of social interaction quite different from those described in the period of modernization define premodern British/European society; models which weirdly (but still historically) seem to prefigure the contemporary global situation more tellingly than does the world of the Waverley novels. This paper will explore the crusader novels for conjunctions between the premodern and postmodern worlds.

David Simpson joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1997 as the G.B. Needham Fellow. Previously he taught at Columbia, the University of Colorado, Northwestern University, and Cambridge. His areas of research and teaching are Romanticism and literary theory. He is a member of the editorial board of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism and of MLQ. He is the author of numerous books, including Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979), Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (1982), Fetishism and Imagination: Melville, Dickens, Conrad (1982), The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (1985), Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination (1987), Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (1993), The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Situatedness; or Why we Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (Duke University Press, 2002).

Seminars / Workshops

 James Chandler (University of Chicago)
“Maria Edgeworth between Smith and Scott”

James Chandler’s research and teaching interests are centered in the Romantic Movement in England and include 18th- and 19th-Century poetry; the rise of historicism, the concept of the "period," the "case," and the historical novel; relations between politics and literature, history and criticism; romantic fiction; the Scottish Enlightenment; Scottish and Irish literatures and cultures; the long history of sentiment; and film.  The Director of the Franke Institute for Humanities, James is currently at work on an edited volume entitled The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature and a monograph that situates the work of Frank Capra in much longer perspectives of cultural and intellectual history, including those that open out to the long-evolving conventions of the sentimental novel and the Romantic-period conception of sympathy and spectatorship in the literary public sphere. Among his published works are England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (University of Chicago, 1998) and Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (University of Chicago, 1984).

 
David Hewitt and Alison Lumsden (University of Aberdeen)
“The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels: Achievement and Retrospect”

David Hewitt is Professor in Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.  He is editor-in-chief of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, the first scholarly edition of Scott's fiction, which is being published in thirty volumes by Edinburgh University Press, and which is due for completion in 2006.  Professor Hewitt heads with Dr Alison Lumsden the Walter Scott Research Centre, which exists to conduct and to promote research into Scott and his works, his intellectual context, and the ways in which his work was used by other writers, other arts, business and politics, particularly in the nineteenth century. Professor Hewitt has wide interests in Enlightenment, Romantic and Scottish literature, and particularly in Burns, Scott and Byron, as well as Scottish language, and in textual and bibliographical research.  On completing the Edition he will embark on an AHRC-supported project with Dr Barbara Fennell to investigate the political implications of the representation of dialect speech in Scotland and Ireland 1700-1900.

Alison Lumsden is Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen.  She is a General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverly Novels and co-director of the University of Aberdeen's Walter Scott Research Centre.  Her main research interests are Walter Scott, nineteenth-century Scottish fiction, Scottish women's writing and textual editing.  She has published on Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alasdair Gray, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon and is co-editor of Contemporary Scottish Women Writers (2000).  She is also co-editor of Scott's The Pirate (2001), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (2004) and Reliquiae Trotcosienses (2004).  She is currently editing Peveril of the Peak for the Edinburgh Edition and working on a monograph on Scott and the literature of North-east Scotland.

Margaret Russett (University of Southern California)
“Authority and Authenticity in Scottish Romanticism”

This seminar will examine how Romantic discourses of authenticity were inflected by the specific genealogical anxieties that shadowed Scottish cultural nationalism in the century following the Act of Union. Focusing primarily on the careers and publishing histories of Walter Scott and the Blackwood’s circle (including James Hogg, John Wilson and J. G. Lockhart), we will also glance at the status of Scottish ballad collections and ballad forgeries dating from the early eighteenth century (Lady Wardlaw’s Hardyknute), through the spectacular career of Ossian, to such “peasant poets” as Allan Cunningham in the early nineteenth century. In this survey we will attempt to understand how and why notions of authenticity and authority evolved differently in the Scottish context than in British or European Romanticism more broadly. We may also consider how Scottish authors collaborated with visual artists to create an “image” of Scottish authenticity in works such as J.M.W. Turner’s Scott-inspired watercolors of Scottish landscapes. Critical readings will include short selections by Russett, Katie Trumpener, Ian Duncan, and Ina Ferris.

Margaret Russett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California, and has also taught recently at Bosphorus University, Istanbul, and the Bread Loaf School of English in Santa Fe. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and was recently awarded a Fulbright Alumni Initiatives Awards Grant to establish an exchange program and summer institute linking USC with Bosphorus University. She is the author of De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge, 1997), Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760-1845 (Cambridge, 2006), and articles in journals such as Studies in Romanticism, ELH, MLQ, Genre, Callaloo, and SEL, where her essay “Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating Christabel” won the Monroe Kirk Spears prize in 2003.

John Plotz (Brandeis University) and Penny Fielding (University of Edinburgh)

“Is There a Whole Hogg?: A Collaborative Seminar on James Hogg’s Shorter Works”

How are we to make sense of the true range of interests and accomplishments--folkloric, supernatural, biographic, international, and interspecies--that the Stirling/South Carolina edition of James Hogg has brought to light? We start with an interest in the ways that Hogg challenges the paradigms of the National Tale, and resists the nostalgia that frequently accompanies the folktale or ballad. But the methodology we propose is open-ended: A collaborative reading of some of the generally unknown short works to be found in The Altrive Tales,Winter Evening Tales and elsewhere. Each story, poem, or squib is guaranteed extravagant, absurd, unsettling, and parodic, in unequal measures. The hope is that, working together as a seminar, we can approach Hogg’s penchant for proliferating narrators, settings, genres, theologies, and ideologies.

John Plotz is Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University and author of The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (California, 2000).  He is currently completing a book called Portable Properties: Problems of Cultural Transmission in Victorian Greater Britain: authors treated include George Eliot, R. D. Blackmore, Thomas Hardy, and William Morris. He has also begun work on a manuscript tentatively titled A History of Antisocialism, Mill to Arendt.

Penny Fielding works on both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and has a particular interest in Scottish literature and prose narrative of this period. Her book Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth Century Scottish Literature was published by Oxford University Press in 1996 and her edition of Scott’s The Monastery (the first modern edition of this novel) by Edinburgh University Press in 2000. She is currently writing a book, provisionally entitled North: Locating British Culture 1760-1840 which addresses the production of a spatial and cultural “North” in this period.

Newly Added

Symposium / Roundtable: "The Novel in World History, 1790-1840" 
(Friday 6:30-8:00pm)

Participants: Margaret Cohen (Director, Center for Studies in the Novel, Stanford University); Catherine Gallagher (representing the Consortium for the Novel, UC Berkeley); Peter Garside (University of Edinburgh; formerly director of Cardiff/Corvey and a general editor of The English Novel, 1770-1829 (Oxford, 2000)); Catherine Jones (Associate Director, Centre for the Novel, University of Aberdeen); Franco Moretti (editor, Il romanzo (Turin, 2001-03) / The Novel (Princeton, 2006)).


Reception and Recital, sponsored by the St Andrew's Society of San Francisco (Saturday, 7:00 pm)

Kirsteen McCue, "The Ettrick Shepherd in Soho Square."
Kirsteen McCue, Lecturer in Scottish Literature and Honorary Research Fellow in Music at the University of Glasgow, is a trained musician and a gifted performer as well as a leading expert on Scottish song. She has presented several series on Scottish music for BBC Radio 3 and Radio Scotland and has performed and lectured to public audiences all over the world, including events at the Edinburgh International Festival. Her recital is associated with a current project, sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, to collect, edit and record the entire corpus of songs by James Hogg, for publication in the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of Hogg. Dr McCue will be accompanied by David Hamilton.