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For centuries, the Devil has featured in Scotland's border ballads, poems, theatre, and prose narratives. In this seminar, we will trace the many forms he has taken as a figure and motif throughout Scottish literary output, how closely these are tied to Scotland's musical and folk tradition, which role the Calvinist national Kirk may have played in the depictions and discussions of the supernatural, in which way this is entangled with the country's history of witch trials in the early modern period, and how the cultural and literary manifestations of the Devil reverberate throughout the centuries.
We will engage with Scottish border ballads such as "Tam Lin" and "The Daemon Lover" and follow Robert Burns's Tam O'Shanter on his wild ride through Ayrshire. We will encounter a devilish doppelganger in James Hogg's famous 19th-century novel questioning the doctrine of predestination, a friendly traveller in disguise in Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale", and an imp locked up in a bottle on Hawai'i by Robert Louis Stevenson. We will take a trip south with Muriel Spark to see a Scottish devil from the past blast into 1960s London, and return to a manse at Scotland's east coast with James Robertson to watch a minister and have a discussion with the Devil about the uses and pitfalls of faith. Finally, we will watch the Devil return to the stage in the 21st century, exploring agency and choice in two plays by Rona Munro and David Greig.
Reading List:
Some primary and secondary reading will be made available via Moodle. Students are asked to obtain the following texts - most of them quite short and all of them highly readable:
- Greig, David. The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart. 2011. Faber & Faber (also available for e-readers).
- Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. 1824. Any edition (mine is the 1997 Wordsworth Classics edition; both Penguin and Oxford UP offer editions which are also available for e-readers).
- Munro, Rona. The Last Witch. 2009. Nick Hern Books (also available for e-readers).
- Robertson, James. The Testament of Gideon Mack. 2006. Penguin (also available for e-readers).
- Spark, Muriel. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. 1960. Any edition (mine is the 2006 Penguin Modern Classics, other editions also available for e-readers).
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