Literature of Scotland: The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century

Critics hailed the first edition of The Literature of Scotland as one of the most comprehensive and fascinatingly readable accounts of Scottish literature in all three of the country’s languages – Gaelic, Scots and English. In this extensively revised and expanded new edition, Roderick Watson traces the lives and works of Scottish writers in a beautiful and rugged country that has been divided by political and religious conflict but united, too, by a democratic and egalitarian ideal of nationhood. The Literature of Scotland: The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century follows the story from Barbour to John Davidson, exploring the growth of the idea of a nation from the flowering of the Makars to the early ballads and the oral tradition; from courtly verse to the prose of the Reformation and the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment; from Duncan Ban Macintyre and the great Gaelic poets to the achievement of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, J. M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson.Each writer is placed in their historical, critical and cultural contexts, and the volume also provides a helpful Further Reading section and chronological timeline, making this the essential guide to Scottish literary history. The literature which followed after the Victorian period is discussed in the companion volume Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century.