Eccentric Scotland Three Victorian poets. James Thompson (“B.V.”), John Davidson, James Young Geddes

Descrizione

This study aims to modify the received opinion that Scottish poetry of the nineteenth-century failed to build on the achievements of the eighteenth and earlier centuries. It focusses on three late nineteenth-century poets – James Thomson (“B.V.”), John Davidson and James Young Geddes – who, despite their idiosyncrasies, are seen as representing an ongoing Scottish tradition, characterised by protean identities and eccentricity, and heralding MacDiarmid and the “Scottish Renaissance” of the twentieth century. The work of these poets is marked by recurring linguistic, stylistic and thematic eccentricities which are often radical and subversive. The poets themeselves, it is suggested, share a condition of estrangement from the official culture of their time either within Scotland (Geddes) or in their English exile (Davidson and Thomson). Outside the social and cultural English mainstream, they form a tradition of their own, defined by eccentric forms and themes. After explicating the notions of “otherness” and “eccentricity”, and outlining existing critical theories on nineteenth-century Scottish literature, Eccentric Scotland explores the innovative and pre-modernist dimension of Thomson’s works, Davidson’s diverse styles and unorthodox ideas, and finally Geddes’s stylistic eccentricity and ideological radicalism. In all three cases, individual, literary and cultural eccentricity is seen as a major creative force in nineteenth-century Scottish literature, just as it was destined to be for Hugh MacDiarmid and other twentieth-century Scottish poets.