Read more
Informationen zum Autor Edited by Gerard Carruthers Klappentext A beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics collection of stories by great Scottish writers from the past two centuries ranging from Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, Irvine Welsh, and Leila Aboulela, and many more. Scottish Stories is a treasury of great writing from an entrancingly literary land. Scotland is known for its centuries of colorful Celtic folklore and its long tradition of spine-tingling ghost stories, as well as for fiction that revels in the gorgeous landscapes of the Highlands and the Western Isles and the rich histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Leseprobe PREFACE Short stories are perhaps the Cinderella of literary genres compared to poetry, the novel and drama. However, shorter fiction is as rich thematically and formally as any of these others, and this is as true for Scotland as for many other nations. One of the places where the short story came into being, in fact, was Scotland. In part, this had to do with the periodical press, including Blackwood’s Magazine (founded in 1817) in Edinburgh with which writers like Walter Scott and James Hogg were associated. Blackwood’s , indeed, was part of an international centre of periodical magazine production in the Scottish capital including its rival, the Edinburgh Review and Tait’s , also, from 1832, a powerful producer of the short story. Often at the cutting edge of new literary development throughout the nineteenth century, Blackwood’s was an important shop-window for new writing talent including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad among many others. Stretching a point, we might almost have claimed for this anthology some of these writers in their Scottish/ Blackwood’s context. Like other post-Enlightenment publications servicing a burgeoning urban population, Blackwood’s channelled the exotic and the supernatural-gothic, and in both its fiction and non-fiction articles gave readers a glimpse of alternative, marginalized, ‘primitive’ lives and experiences in general. Broadly, this context helps explain Walter Scott in ‘The Two Drovers’ comparing and contrasting different cultural ways of living within Britain (English and Scottish, which equally have their historical hinterland: Robin Hood as much as Rob Roy). Might it be, Scott asks in his text, that as we rush headlong into modern progress (a worry then as now), we do not properly consider older ways of living, diverse codes of human behaviour? His is a story that asks us to empathize all round amid this clash of cultures: we need law and order, we need civilization but we need to understand the different formative circumstances of peoples within a multifarious nation state: the United Kingdom. Similarly, James Hogg in ‘The Cameronian Preacher’s Tale’ asks us to take seriously the possibility of something we might usually dismiss, the supernatural. Do we believe in this or not, we – like the original readerly audience – are asked to consider. How ‘modern’ are we? Are we post-Enlightenment people who have done away with more ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ beliefs? The supernatural features here in stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant, Eric Linklater, Muriel Spark, Dorothy K. Haynes and George Mackay Brown. In each of them, however, the other-worldly is insinuated within human action that is very real-worldly, and all abound with reflections upon morality, religion, human avarice and how we narrate stories. Since the Romantic period, the rise of anthropo...
