Category: Scottish Literature
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Week 13: The Best-Laid Schemes . . .
Burns’s “To a Mouse” (1785) is one of those poems so culturally ubiquitous – in Scotland anyway – that its lines have become verbal tics or pieces of linguistic shorthand like Chinese Chengyu. I was reflecting on this while mentally composing the present blog post. A little less than a month ago The Historian and I moved…
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What David Drummond Read
One chapter of my new book is devoted to the reception of the historical-antiquarian works I study. As part of that I’ve been putting together a sprawling spreadsheet of the 4,000 or so persons known to have subscribed for scholarly texts published in Edinburgh between 1708 (when publication by subscription seems to have first been…
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Teaching Older Scottish Literature
This afternoon I found myself filling out paperwork with a lighter mood than usually attends such activities. Why? I was writing the course description for a new fourth-year module I’ve been wanting to teach for a very long time: Scottish literature from Renaissance to Enlightenment. My own exposure to the period as an undergraduate was…
Kelsey Jackson Williams 