Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition
by Elizabeth Waterston (9780802086853)

Rapt in Plaid combines reflection, criticism, and memoir to illustrate a curious and long-lasting connection between Scottish and Canadian literary traditions. Examples drawn from genres including lyric poetry, narrative romance, war fiction, children's literature, sentimental fiction, thrillers, domestic novels, and short stories link Canadian writers such as John Richardson, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Sinclair Ross, Hugh MacLennan, Margaret Laurence, and W.O. Mitchell to Scottish writers such as Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, J.M. Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, and George Mackay Brown. Elizabeth Waterson traces the connections from directly imitative nineteenth-century Canadian writers to modern Canadian works in which Scottish tradition persists, sometimes transformed and sometimes distorted. Lively biographical sketches and close analysis of particular passages by Scottish and Canadian writers are set in the context of multicultural, narrative, postmodern, and postcolonial theories. Rapt in Plaid illuminates the way Scottish ideas and values still wield surprising power in Canadian politics, education, theology, economics, and social mores. Although Waterston's method is that of a literary historian, she frames each section in this new work with affectionate memories of reading, researching, and teaching Scottish and Canadian literature over a sixty-year period.

USD $29.95

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