Books in the Studies in the History and Culture of Scotland series

Since World War I, communities of Gaelic-speaking Scotland, characterised by collaborative effort and a robust sense of communal identity, have been transformed. This book will help scholars and general readers grasp the magnitude of change as it has transformed an important aspect of Scottish Gaelic culture.

This book explores the role of the flute in Scottish musical life, primarily in the long eighteenth century, including players, repertoire, manuscripts, and instruments. Evidence for ladies having played the flute is examined, as are possible connections between flute playing and bagpipe playing.

This study argues that the works of the Scottish novelist James Kelman should not be seen as a resigned capitulation to capitalism or an acceptance of the fracture of a working-class collective purpose. Instead, his fiction continually disputes the notion of consensus by revealing the voices of those excluded, those who are unaccounted for.

Discomfort and Joy

This study is the first monograph on the Scottish writer Brian McCabe. It focuses mainly on McCabe's fiction and on the elements in his writing that allow for a redefinition of individual and national identity. The book opens with an examination of the socio-cultural context that shapes McCabe's position in contemporary Scottish literature. The author goes on to consider McCabe as a writer of the Second Renaissance and the generation of the Lost Poets, and also focuses on the Scottish preoccupation with identity and its representations in the contemporary Scottish short story. Finally, she provides a chronological and thematic analysis of McCabe's short story collections The Lipstick Circus, In a Dark Room with a Stranger and A Date with my Wife, and his novel The Other McCoy.

This interdisciplinary collection draws from the fields of art, literature, social history, demography and legal history, and both architectural and landscape history. Essays employ a range of methodologies and materials - visual, statistical, archival and literary - to illustrate the richness of the primary sources for studying death in Scotland.

This book aims to address the lack of sustained attention given to Margaret Tait's large body of work, offering a contextualisation of Tait's films within a general consideration of Scottish cinema and artists' moving image. The book's grounding in detailed archival research offers new insights into Scotland (and Britain) in the Twentieth century.

The fifteen essays gathered in this book probe the multi-facetted role of death in Scottish history and culture. They explore personal fears of death, anxieties about Predestination, prayers for the dead and the appeal of Spiritualism