Postcolonialism and Literary Representations of the British Regions (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)

National Identity versus Commerce: An Analysis of Opportunities and Limitations within the Welsh Music Scene for Composers and Performing Musicians

by Paul Carr

This paper is currently in the editing process for publication by Ashgate. I will add more details here once I have them

"Almost the Same, but Not Quite": English Poetry by Eighteenth-Century Scots.

by Corey E. Andrews

The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 47.1 (Spring 2006): 59-79.

Eighteenth-century Scottish poetry has often been regarded as the product of only three men, each greater than the... more Eighteenth-century Scottish poetry has often been regarded as the product of only three men, each greater than the last. This Scots triad—Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and Robert Burns—has served as the de facto nationalist vanguard of eighteenth-century Scottish poetry, defiantly opposing the forces of English assimilation provoked by the Union of 1707. In this scenario (and given the altogether slender opus of Scots poems in the eighteenth century), the abundance of English verse by the Scots triad may continue to provoke the nagging suspicion that perhaps eighteenth-century Scots really did have a cultural "inferiority complex." Critics contending with eighteenth-century Scottish poetry face an apparent impasse: either continue studying a relatively limited sampling of Scots or hybrid Scots poems or argue for the value of English verse by Scottish poets. The former task not only invites critical burnout, but also relies on dubious assumptions about the function of Scots in eighteenth-century Scotland. For many critics, forces of cultural imperialism bent on eradicating literary Scots and its practitioners are the sole culprit for the loss of a cohesive Scottish national identity after the Union. However, in a nation with a diverse linguistic inheritance in Gaelic, Scots, and English, poets such as Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns explored the possibilities of English in the same manner they did Scots: through self-conscious imitation of existing literary models. Plainly put, Scottish poets wrote in English for specific reasons that are as reflective of their culture as their motives for writing in Scots.