Germanà, M. 2017. Authorship, “Ghost-filled” Islands, and the Haunting Feminine: Contemporary Scottish Female Gothic’. in: Germanà, M. and Davison, C. (ed.) The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Gothic Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press. pp. 222-235
| Chapter title | Authorship, “Ghost-filled” Islands, and the Haunting Feminine: Contemporary Scottish Female Gothic’ |
|---|---|
| Authors | Germanà, M. |
| Editors | Germanà, M. and Davison, C. |
| Abstract | As Angela Wright reminds us, ‘Scottish Gothic is intimately concerned with the process of telling a tale’ (‘Scottish Gothic’, 76). As with David Punter, who has drawn attention to the uncanny significance of the ‘monument’ and the ‘ruin’ in Scottish and Irish Gothic (‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’, 105), Wright argues that ‘graves, castles, manuscripts and inscriptions are all warmly contested sites of authenticity and authority’ (‘Scottish Gothic’, 76). As with the canonical texts of Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner (1824), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), much contemporary Scottish Gothic engages simultaneously with the textual, architectural and geological pasts of Scotland’s people and territory. The land- and city-scapes of such narratives are haunted both by their histories and the texts that appear within them, often with intertextual and metafictional intentions. Such is the case, for instance, in Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995), and Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy (2004). The present chapter proposes to analyse such legacy in contemporary women’s Gothic, with specific references to Louise Welsh’s Naming the Bones (2011), Alice Thompson’s Burnt Island (2013), and Amy Sackville’s Orkney (2013). What these novels share is a self-reflective engagement with a web of textual references that permeate the main narratives. Dead authors, plagiarism, and lost manuscripts function here to generate an intense interrogation of authorial voice and authenticity. Such questioning reverberates my choice of authors, too: since Sackville is not Scottish, the chapter will take issue with the ‘Scottishness’ of these Gothic texts, proposing a view of Scottish Gothic that might challenge national identity discourse. The questions raised by the texts are reflected, in turn, by the novels’ strong engagement with the landscape, which, in the three novels, is strongly connected to the geology and archaeology of Scottish islands. As John Berger suggested, ‘The address of western Ireland or Scotland is tidal, recurring, ghost-filled’ (Keeping a Rendezvous pp. 68–9), and it is this uncanny scenery that accommodates the narratives’ elusive spectrality. |
| Keywords | Scottish Gothic |
| Scottish women's writing | |
| Orkney | |
| Louise Welsh | |
| Amy Sackville | |
| Alice Thompson | |
| Book title | The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Gothic |
| Page range | 222-235 |
| Year | 2017 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | Mar 2017 |
| Published | Aug 2018 |
| Place of publication | Edinburgh |
| Edition | Hardback |
| Paperback | |
| Series | Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic |
| ISBN | 9781474408196 |
| 9781474437714 | |
| Web address (URL) | https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-scottish-gothic.html |