HARDLY ORIGINAL, BUT ONE IS tempted to describe this as ane end of ane auld sang, as Professor G Ross Roy signs off from more than four decades of editorship of his seminal Studies in Scottish Literature.
When the intrepid Roy, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and a world authority on Robert Burns, launched SSL in 1963, with a founding editorial board including Hugh MacDiarmid, it was the first significant scholarly jo
urnal dealing with an appallingly neglected area, and there were those who predicted it would last for only one issue. Instead, it has become what one contributor in this final edition calls the "pre-eminent magazine for Scottish literary studies" – commensurate with Roy's achievements at USC in establishing one of the world's major collections of Burns and other Scottish literature.
In the present publication, RDS Jack quotes the poet Tom Scott, in the first, 1963-4 volume, lamenting "the ghastliness of the position here in Scotland", at a time when "No Scottish university has a Department of Scottish Studies, literary or otherwise". Jack comments that while, thankfully, times have changed, SSL, under Ross Roy's editorship, has "provided a focus and a voice for the movement".
With its cover and elegant end papers by Alasdair Gray, this valedictory flourish departs from SSL's usual practice of carrying purely scholarly articles by also featuring poetry and prose. It opens with a starkly compassionate poem in Scots, Burdalane, from William McIlvanney (a recorded version of which comes on an accompanying CD) and ends with the Highland surrealism of one of the late Iain Crichton Smith's Murdo tales.
Other poetry includes Robert Henryson translated into English by Seamus Heaney and "pomes" in Gaelic and English by Aonghas MacNeacail, who plays neatly on the words "Ross Roy" and the Gaelic "ros ruadh" for red headland. A short story left to Roy by Muriel Spark has an unsettling twist.
Studies include Edward J Cowan's lively exposition on chapbooks, those folded-sheet precursors of pulp literature too often consigned to the margins of our cultural history, yet which are reckoned to have sold an astonishing 200,000 copies in Scotland between 1750 and 1850. Approaches range from Maurice Lindsay's sprawlingly compendious survey of 20th-century Scottish creative writing to some intriguing particulars: Kenneth Simpson's analysis of the Burns-Clarinda correspondence, highlighting the poet's consciously stylised prose, or Douglas S Mack's examination of the relationship between Hogg, Scott, Byron and the publisher John Murray, showing the "Ettrick Shepherd" struggling, not only financially, but with the constraints of his class, while Byron advises him to marry a rich West Indian heiress to bolster his finances.
In evoking his old professor at Edinburgh University, Kenneth Joshua Fielding, and his work on the letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Roger L Tarr gives insight into the vagaries of academic politics, while J Derrick McLure argues that Edwin Morgan's translation of Racine's Phaedra, in its marrying of French classical theatre to Scots urban demotic is "one of the most audacious moves yet made in the developing status of the Scots tongue". Moving to the Gaeltacht, Ian Simpson Ross examines Dr Johnson's Highland tour of 1773, starting with the bluff doctor astonishing the company of at an inn by mimicking the newly discovered kangaroo, and ending with the ironic juxtaposition of Mendelssohn's overture The Hebrides sounding as thousands of Gaelic-speakers emigrate from their newly romanticised homeland.
In his introduction, Roy, now 84, describes this as the "final regular issue" of SSL, adding that it may be followed by a comprehensive index, but one can't imagine this consummate scholar hanging up his editorial hat quite so readily – particularly with next years' Burns 250th anniversary looming. As he says himself: "I know when to walk away, but I don't have to run."
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e-mail tclrare@mailbox.sc.eduThe full article contains 666 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
