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New Publications

Scotnote series cover Scotnote for But n Ben A-Go-Go by Matthew Fitt
by Christine Robinson
Association for Scottish Literary Studies, October 2008
The Scotnote booklets are a series of study guides to major Scottish writers and literary texts for students at the level of high school senior and beyond. Scotnotes provide students with valuable aids to the key writers and major texts within the Scottish literary tradition. There are now twenty-four titles in this series, ranging from the fifteenth-century poetics of William Dunbar to the present-day writings of Iain Banks, Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan, Ian Rankin, and more.

The Scotnote for But n Ben A-Go-Go is a very recent publication and is currently only available from ASLS – but will soon be available from Amazon websites. Contact us for more information or to order your copy.

But n Ben A-Go-Go is set in a distinctly unbonnie future-Scotland. The novel's dangerous atmosphere and psychologically-malkied characters weave a tale that both chills and intrigues. Matthew Fitt takes the allegedly dead language of Scots and energises it with a narrative that cracks and fizzles with life. With strong characters and a gripping plot, the well-defined settings create an atmosphere of paranoia and danger.The exciting denouement has a surprising twist! The introduction includes a section on how to read the Scots in this book, Matthew has made the spelling as straightforward as possible for a population used to English spelling conventions.

The Ruins of Experience cover The Ruins of Experience: Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness
by Matthew Wickman
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006
There emerged, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a reflexive relationship between shifting codes of legal evidence in British courtrooms and the growing fascination throughout Europe with the "primitive" Scottish Highlands. New methods for determining evidential truth, linked with the growing prominence of lawyers and a formalized division of labor between witnesses and jurors, combined to devalue the authority of witness testimony, magnifying the rupture between experience and knowledge. Juries now pronounced verdicts based not upon the certainty of direct experience but rather upon abstractions of probability or reasonable likelihood. Yet even as these changes were occurring, the Scottish Highlands and Hebridean Islands were attracting increased attention as a region where witness experience in sublime and communal forms had managed to trump enlightened progress and the probabilistic, abstract, and mediated mentality on which the Enlightenment was predicated. Matthew Wickman examines this uncanny return of experiential authority at the very moment of its supposed decline and traces the alluring improbability of experience into our own time.

Kailyard and Scottish Literature cover Kailyard and Scottish Literature
by Andrew Nash
Rodopi (Scottish Cultural Review of Literature and Language (SCROLL) series) 2007
For more than a century, the word 'Kailyard' has been a focal point of Scottish literary and cultural debate. Originally a term of literary criticism, it has come to be used, often pejoratively, across a whole range of academic and popular discourse. Historians, politicians and critics of Scottish film and media have joined literary scholars in using the term to set out a diagnosis of Scottish culture. This is the first comprehensive study of the subject. Andrew Nash traces the origins of the Kailyard diagnosis in the nineteenth century and considers the critical concerns that gave rise to it. He then provides a full reassessment of the literature most commonly associated with the term - the fiction of J.M. Barrie, S.R. Crockett and Ian Maclaren. Placing this work in more appropriate contexts, he considers the literary, social and religious imperatives that underpinned it and discusses the impact of these writers in the publishing world. These chapters are succeeded by detailed analysis of the various ways in which the term has been used in wider discussions of Scottish literature and culture. Discussing literary criticism, film studies, and political and sociological analyses of Scotland, Nash shows how Kailyard, as a critical term, helps expose some of the key issues in Scottish cultural debate in the twentieth century, including discussions over national representation, popular culture and the parochialism of Scottish culture.

Guest Profile:
The Scottish Text Society

Scottish Text Society logo The Scottish Text Society is a major publisher of important texts from Scotland's literary history. Since 1882 it has played a significant part in reviving interest in the literature and languages of Scotland. The Society's editions are both scholarly and accessible.

To date, the Society has published some 150 volumes, covering poetry, drama, and prose, from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The majority of its editions are in the high period of Older Scots literature, from 1500 to 1700, although the Society has also published significant items from the eighteenth century, such as the poems of Robert Fergusson, and The Song Repertoire of Amelia and Jane Harris. The Society has also published the most detailed account of Older Scots philology, Older Scots Vowels, by A. J. Aitken and C. Macafee; and has very recently collaborated with the National Library of Scotland to produce a DVD of the Chepman and Myllar prints, with full transcriptions.

Appropriately enough, the Society's other publications this year also reflect Chepman and Myllar's work. The Poems of Walter Kennedy, ed. Nicole Meier, includes The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy as well as his other, less well-known work; The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane ed. Ralph Hanna, only survives in a Chepman and Myllar print. Other editions currently available include reprints of the Society's editions of the two great epic poems of the wars of independence, Barbour's Bruce and Hary's Wallace; a revised edition of The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas; and Sir David Hume's History of the House of Angus, which has not been available in print since the eighteenth century. A full list of publications is available on the Society's website.

  • Members of the Society are entitled to volumes in the main series published during their year of membership: for further details, see the Society's website.
  • Non-members wishing to buy editions should visit the website of the Society's distributor, Boydell and Brewer.

Further information on all the publications mentioned in the article above is available on page 2 of this article.

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