Our Research

The most recent issue of Studies in Scottish Literature (45.2) is a symposium on Religion in Scottish Literary Criticism. It includes articles on: 

'Archibald Pitcairne's Liturgical Year', by Kelsey Jackson Williams; 

'Presbyterianism, 'Scottish Literature,' and John Galt's Annals of the Parish', by Robert P. Irvine; 

'Carlyle and Calvinism', by Joanna Malecka;

'The Sunset Song of Religion: Or Have We Ever Been Post-Secular', by Matthew Wickman;

'Losing his Religion: the Neglected Catholicism of A.J. Cronin', by Gerard Carruthers;

'A Revision of Power: Religion in Fionn Mac Colla's And the Cock Crew', by Brooke McLaughlin Mitchell;

'Calvinism, Catholicism, and Fascism in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', by Richard Rankin Russell;

'Hearing Competing Voices in James Robertson’s The Fanatic', by Alison Jack;

'Afterword: Finding Religion in Scottish Literary History', by Crawford Gribben.

Recent publications by members of the Steering Group of the Scottish Network for Religion and Literature:

Linden Bicket:

• 'Catholic and Protestant Sensibilities in Scottish Literature: Stevenson to Spark', in The History of Scottish Theology, Volume III: The Long Twentieth Century, eds. David Fergusson and Mark Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 271-87
• George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)

Michael Fuller:

• 'Redemption in Wagner: The case of Senta', The Wagner Journal, vol. 14 no. 1 (March 2020), pp. 4-15

Alison Jack:

• ‘Holding “surprise wide open”: The healing of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof in the poetry of Seamus Heaney’, in Christianity and Literature (Forthcoming)
• ‘The Calvinist Paradox in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature’, in The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II: The Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era, eds. David Fergusson and Mark Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 213-227
• The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Steven Sutcliffe:

• '"Beating on Your Heart": Occultism and Neo-Romanticism in the Fiction of David Lindsay', in The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875-1947, eds. Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford (London: Routledge, 2017)