2.15 - The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

Summary

This chapter discusses the use of Gothic convention in four nineteenth-century Scottish writers: Walter Scott, James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant and Robert Louis Stevenson. Proceeding by means of an account of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s recitation of William Taylor’s English translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s supernatural ballad ‘Lenore’ in Edinburgh in 1794, it shows how Scottish writers from this moment onwards were inspired to merge the conventions of Gothic poetry with the balladic and folkloric traditions of their own country. What resulted, the chapter shows, was that distinctive form of textually complex writing that characterises much Scottish Gothic writing of the period, a mode that, in its preoccupations with dialogic voices, splitting and uncanny doubling, enacted some of the political and cultural tensions that lay at the heart of the nation itself.