Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Cultural Exchange: from Medieval
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Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Volume 1: Issue 1 Cultural Exchange: from Medieval to Modernity AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies JOURNAL OF IRISH AND SCOTTISH STUDIES Volume 1, Issue 1 Cultural Exchange: Medieval to Modern Published by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen in association with The universities of the The Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative and The Stout Research Centre Irish-Scottish Studies Programme Victoria University of Wellington ISSN 1753-2396 Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Issue Editor: Cairns Craig Associate Editors: Stephen Dornan, Michael Gardiner, Rosalyn Trigger Editorial Advisory Board: Fran Brearton, Queen’s University, Belfast Eleanor Bell, University of Strathclyde Michael Brown, University of Aberdeen Ewen Cameron, University of Edinburgh Sean Connolly, Queen’s University, Belfast Patrick Crotty, University of Aberdeen David Dickson, Trinity College, Dublin T. M. Devine, University of Edinburgh David Dumville, University of Aberdeen Aaron Kelly, University of Edinburgh Edna Longley, Queen’s University, Belfast Peter Mackay, Queen’s University, Belfast Shane Alcobia-Murphy, University of Aberdeen Brad Patterson, Victoria University of Wellington Ian Campbell Ross, Trinity College, Dublin The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies is a peer reviewed journal, published twice yearly in September and March, by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. An electronic reviews section is available on the AHRC Centre’s website: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/ahrc- centre.shtml Editorial correspondence, including manuscripts for submission, should be addressed to The Editors,Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG or emailed to [email protected] Subscriptions and business correspondence should be address to The Administrator. Cover image, Callum Colvin, ‘Blind Ossian’, from ‘Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry’ (2002). The face of the poet is based on an etching by Alexander Runciman (1736-85). CONTENTS Editorial v What’s the Matter?: Medieval Literary Theory and the Irish Campaigns 11 in The Bruce R. D. S. Jack Voices of the Vanquished: Echoes of Language Loss in Gaelic Poetry 25 from Kinsale to the Great Famine Tom Dunne Irish Political Verse and the American Revolutionary War 45 Vincent Morley The Oral Tradition and Literature in Ireland and Scotland: 61 Popular Culture in Robert Burns and Charles Maturin Jim Kelly Setting His Own Standard: James Orr’s Employment 73 of a Traditional Stanza Form Carol Baraniuk Dugald Stewart and the Problem of Teaching Politics in the 1790s 87 Michael Brown Dissolving the Dream of Empire: Fratriotism, 127 Boswell, Byron and Moore Murray Pittock Radical Satire, Politics and Genre: The Case of Thomas Moore 145 Jane Moore Away with the Faeries (or, It’s Grimm up North): Yeats and Scotland 161 Willy Maley Reshaping Scotland: Ireland, Europe and the Interwar Scottish 179 Literary Renaissance Movement Margery Palmer McCulloch “Crossing Swords with W. B. Yeats”: Twentieth Century Scottish 191 Nationalist Encounters With Ireland Bob Purdie The Abbey: National Theatre or Little Theatre? 211 Nicholas Grene Playing National: The Scottish Experiment 221 Donald Smith Relations and Comparisons between Irish and Scottish Poetry: 1890 231 to the Present Day Edna Longley Kelman * Deleuze * Beckett 241 Michael Gardiner Stateless Nation / Nationless State: History, Anomaly and Devolution 253 in Scottish and Northern Irish Writing Aaron Kelly The Revival of the Ulster-Scots Cultural Identity 271 at the Beginning of the 21st Century Linda M. Hagan Identifying Another Other 283 Cairns Craig E DITORIAL Irish-Scottish Studies as an area of modern academic concern began in the 1970s and 1980s in a series of symposia supported by the Social Science Research Council and focused on the economic histories of Ireland and Scotland. In the proceedings of the first of these –Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic History 1600–1900 (1977) – the editors T. C. Smout and L. M Cullen say that ‘the idea for a seminar to compare aspects of Scottish and Irish economic and social development 1600–1900 occurred to the editors at a meeting at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1973’, and it is worth quoting at length the issues that inspired their initial discussions: Both countries within the period have exchanged populations in the Scottish movement to Ulster in the seventeenth century and the equally significant movement of Irishmen to Scotland in the nineteenth. In both countries the cattle trade was a leading commercial sector in the seventeenth century and the linen trade was the main manufacture of the eighteenth; both countires attempted a cotton industry, which was much more successful in Scotland in the nineteenth century; both countries are famous for whisky (or for whiskey); both countries had important growth in their foreign trade before the American War of Independence, but Scotland was granted direct access to the colonies and Ireland denied it; both countries were affected by the improving landlords of the eighteenth century and the Higlands like Ireland were obsessed by the movement for tenants’ rights in the nineteenth. In both countries economic development was threatened by recurrent imbal- ances between food supply and population growth; most of Scotland escaped the trap but Ireland, in 1846, failed to do so. The driving force behind this agenda, as Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck put it in their introduction to the published version of the third symposium – Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland 1500–1939 (1988) – was ‘why did the Scottish and Irish economies diverge so markedly in the vi years after c.1780?’ The Irish-Scottish comparison represented, as it were, a test bed for explaining ‘economic take-off ’ and the processes of modernisation. The differences between them were subsequently to feed into the reconceptu- alisation of Scotland as the nation which, as in the notable subtitle to Arthur Herman’s The Scottish Enlightenment (2001), ‘created our world and everything in it’. As T. M. Devine – a regular participant in the symposia and editor (with David Dickson) of the second collection of essays, Ireland and Scotland 1600–1850 (1983) – was to put it in The Scottish Nation (1999), Scotland, rather than England, was the country in which ‘there truly was an Industrial and Agricultural Revolution’ (107). Scotland’s leading role in ‘modernisation’, together with the impact of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on the under- standing of the dynamics of historical change, gave a new significance to a history that had often been presented as simply the after-echo of events in England. Ironically, perhaps, it was in the very years of these discussions of the differ- ences between the historical experiences of Ireland and Scotland that Ireland’s contemporary economy was preparing for its own spectacular economic take- off, one that would give the ‘divergence’ in the performances of the Irish and Scottish economies a very different contemporary significance. As the BBC’s James Helms has commented, many in Europe ‘feel that Ireland is Europe’s shining success story, a place transformed during its EU membership from one of the continent’s poorest members to the top of the league’ and, therefore, a model for all the other small countries which ‘enlargement’ has brought into the European fold. Ireland’s Presidency of the European Union also gave its political class a status in Europe to which Scottish politicians could not aspire – except by going through Westminster. Where Ireland had once been offered in Scotland as proof of the irrelevance of political independence to economic development, Ireland now regularly outmanoeuvred Scotland in the attrac- tion of the ‘inward investment’ on which Scottish economic development had been premised. If Irish studies had been fuelled in part by the major achieve- ments of its writers in the twentieth century, from Yeats and Joyce to Heaney and Muldoon, and in part, too, since the 1960s, by the media visibility of the Troubles in the North, they gained an international impetus in the 1990s that Scottish Studies could not begin to emulate. Those early meetings of economic historians took place around the time of the failed Scottish devolution referendum of 1979, and the condition of modern Scotland was then the cause of widespread despair. If Tom Nairn’s influential The Break-up of Britain (1977) held out the prospect of Scottish vii political independence as a consequence of the collapse of the British state, it did so on the basis of presenting Scotland itself as nation in terminal decline: ‘one can of course say that modern Scotland has its own unmistakable “identi- ty”. Is it right to refuse “identity” to a hopeless neurotic, because he is different from others, and unhappy about the fact?’ (173). But Scotland itself was to undergo a transformation just as significant in its own way as the economic transformation of Ireland – not a political revolution but a revolution in its cultural self-perception, founded on the reinterpretation of the richness of its cultural past as presented in studies such as Alexander Broadie’s The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy (1990), Duncan Macmillan’s Scottish Art 1460–1990 (1990) and John Purser’s Scotland’s Music (1992). At the same time the creative achievement of writers such as Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Kathleen Jamie and Janice Galloway, reached heights that for some suggested we were living in a ‘second Scottish Renaissance’. If the new Scottish Parliament, voted for in 1997 and opened in 1999, was indeed, in John Smith’s famous phrase, ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’, that ‘will’ had been given purpose by what had amounted, in the years since the first Thatcher government, to a declara- tion of cultural independence. The movement towards devolution in Scotland made Irish-Scottish rela- tions not merely a matter of significance to the nations’ past but of potential future significance to both countries.