Periodicals have been unusually central to Scottish literary culture, and have often been a key conduit for connecting with the rest of the British cultural and political scene. This session will briefly introduce some key Scottish magazines since 1800, with a focus on the cultural politics of ‘provincial’ versus ‘national’ publishing. The journals and magazines we’ll consider frequently grapple with questions of audience, influence and peripherality on terms which bring publishing and literary criticism into direct and unavoidable contact with the national question in politics.

Dr Scott Hames is Senior Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Stirling, where he writes mainly about Scottish literature and cultural politics. He has particular interests in the post-1960s movement for Scottish devolution, which led to the creation of a Scottish Parliament in 1999.
The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation was published in 2020. It‘s a cultural history and critique of devolution, focused on the role of writers, critics, magazines and intellectuals.
He also leads the Scottish Magazines Network, an AHRC research network partnered with the National Library of Scotland. His current book project is on the political essayist Tom Nairn (1932-2023), arguably the most influential Scottish intellectual of the past century, who made his entire career in magazines and forgotten newspapers.

You can download the poster for the event here.