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This book introduces a new critical framework for reading medieval texts. The narrative grotesque decentres critical discourse by turning focus to points at which literary texts distort and rupture conventional narratological and poetic boundaries. These boundary-warping grotesques are crystallised at moments affective horror and humour. Two seminal Older Scots works are used to exemplify the multivalent applications of the narrative grotesque: Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour (c. 1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c. 1507). These texts create manifold textual hybridisations, transfigurations, and ruptures in order to interrogate modes of discourse, narratological subjectivities, and medieval genre conventions. Within the liminal space opened up by these textual (de)constructions, it is possible to reconceptualise the ways in which poets engaged with concepts of authenticity, veracity, subjectivity, and eloquence in literary writing during the late medieval period.
Literature in Older Scots includes a group of poems, mostly anonymous, that employs supernatural phenomena for burlesque or satiric purposes. Aptly called ‘elrich fantasyis’, 1 they include Roule’s ‘Devyne poware of michtis maist’, The Gyre Carling , ‘My gudame wes a gay wyf’, ‘God and Sanct Petir’, ‘The Crying of ane Playe’, Lichtoun’s ‘Quha doutis dremis is bot phantasye?’ and Lord Fergus Gaist . 2 In their ‘comic supernaturalism’ 3 and inventive mixed reference to popular traditions, romances, classical literature, magic, witchcraft and church ritual
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
appearance of the form in Older Scots literature. Sir Gilbert Hay’s mid-fifteenth-century romance The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (hereafter BKA ) contains an exemplary instance of the verse demande . Firstly, BKA establishes the terms of the courtly debate: the gallant ‘ȝoung Betis’ is chosen as the ‘King of Lufe’ from a mixed group of courtly participants. Upon his election, he ‘maid ane aith þat he sould, but reprufe, / Off all demandis gif richtwis iugment / Belangand lufe, treuly by his entent
sense of two Older Scots poems that have confounded categorisation or any sustained, systematic analysis for that matter. The two texts under consideration do not share, broadly speaking, generic categories, nor do they appear to deal with similar subject matter. However, the narrative grotesque functions as a sort of anamorphic lens that brings into focus hitherto unremarked or unnoticed correlations. Distortion thus resolves from this specialised vantage point. This process of clarification revolves around narrative
philosophical and aesthetic concerns in literary narratives. This study considers two Older Scots poems that exemplify the narrative grotesque, namely Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour ( c . 1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo ( c . 1507). Narrowing focus to these two texts allows for a forensic examination of the multivalent forms and outcomes of the narrative grotesque. When it is applied as a framework for reading medieval texts the narrative grotesque will be shown to be an
with Early Scots. Adam J. Aitken, in his work ‘How to Pronounce Older Scots’, in Adam J. Aitken et al. (eds), Bards and Makars: Scottish Language and Literature, Medieval and Renaissance (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977), pp. 1–21, at p. 2, and others make the distinction between pre-literary Introduction 21 Scots (the language spoken and to some extent written in the period from 1100, the end of the Old English period, to 1375), Early Scots (1375–1450), and Middle Scots (1450–1700), all of which can be summarised as Older Scots. See also J
definitions and etymologies they record. GILMOUR 9781526108845 PRINT.indd 89 11/06/2020 11:00 90 Bad English This tethering is evident when Kinloch uses Scots words in his poetry. They exist in relation to the pages of the dictionary from which they are drawn, erupting out of them unpredictably, springing into the present while still tied to the past, dissident words resisting any efforts at assimilation. In the prose-poem ‘Dustie-Fute’, the Scottish narrator is surprised by the sudden appearance of the old Scots word dustie-fute (‘acrobat’) from Jamieson
in other Older Scots works to indicate a companion or comrade, a mate or spouse. The former usage appears, for instance, in Barbour and Wyntoun. It also occurs in an avian context in Howlat . This amplifies the preceding use of the term bernis (60; 74), which is a poetic and alliterative noun for man, but with specific martial connotations that are attested in The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane , Hary’s Wallace , and The Taill of Rauf Coilȝear. These choices are important, since they connect into a
second Irish volume also did not arrive, although this and the Welsh one were certainly sent by Thomson. 24 The fourth volume, however, containing Beethoven's above-mentioned settings of twenty-four Scottish melodies and one English one, did reach him in 1818, and he managed to sell these twenty-five settings to Schlesinger for a German edition. Schlesinger was initially uneasy about arranging translations from old Scots, but Beethoven knew sufficient English to be able to assure him that the texts were in modern