Frauke Reitemeier Knihy

Scotland's literary and cultural heritage is infused with narratives of crime. Both real and imagined criminals have shaped the image of Scotland's supposed dual soul. The tension between good and evil, salvation and redemption as well as beauty and repulsiveness lies at the heart of the Scottish Tartan Noir tradition, which has been thriving ever since Robert Louis Stevenson published his novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Critics have frequently used Gregory Smith's term 'Caledonian antisyzygy' in order to express what has been perceived as the duality of the Scottish character, yet up to this day neither the production nor the reception of Scotland's alleged split soul has been properly analyzed or understood.§§This volume seeks to explore the wide field of Scottish crime narratives from a variety of perspectives and with a focus on a variety of themes. Crimes in Scottish history and their treatment in literature and film are discussed in the collected papers, as are questions of spatiality and gender and genre in Scottish crime writing. The book also features a special section on Ian Rankin's Rebus novels and two 'Crimelight' articles that yield insight into both the historical and the current literary scene of Scottish crime writers.

From Diogenes to Appiah, Ovid to Shakespeare, from Jacobean to Edwardian England, from gender approaches to revising theories of identity: The Bachelor’s and Master’s theses collected in this volume are concerned with changes in various forms. Some chart the transmutation of a literary idea or motif into a different time or genre, others transfer concepts to new surroundings and test their uses. The papers are not restricted to literary topics but cover a broad range of cultural products and contexts, and they are often complementary: While Kirstin Runge charts the transformation of the Adonis story from Ovid to Shakespeare, discussing the functions of the poem for Shakespeare’s reputation, Anika Droste looks at the practices and representations of violence in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, noting how various Shakespearean plays depict an unstable society by picking up public concerns common to the time. In similar ways, von Blanckenburg’s and Glowsky’s contributions look at nineteenth-century literature, while Schlink and Helm consider various cultural theories in a very modern context. Together, these papers present change from diverse perspectives, political as well as cultural, textual as well as theoretical, and provide the reader with a new insight into literary concepts and ideas throughout the centuries.