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.
Picture:
This is part of the 2019 mural by Nichol Wheatley at Glasgow's cultural centre Oran Mór, illustrating the devil playing the bagpipes at the witches' sabbath scene from Robert Burn's 1790 poem "Tam O'Shanter".
- Lehrende(r): Julia Boll