Literature and Languages
Staff Information
Professor Rory Watson
Books
MacDiarmid (Open University Press, 1985)
The Poetry of Norman MacCaig (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1989)
The Literature of Scotland: Volume I: The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth century; Volume II: The Twentieth Century. Second edition, revised and expanded (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
The Poetry of Scotland, ed., (Edinburgh University Press, 1995)
Poetry
28 Poems, with James Rankin, (Aberdeen, 1964)
Roderick Watson, Parklands Poets (Akros Press, Preston, 1970)
Trio, with Val Simmons and Paul Mills (New Rivers Press, New York, 1971)
True History on the Walls (Macdonald, Edinburgh, 1977)
Into the Blue Wavelengths: love poems and elegies (Luath, Edinburgh 2004)
Articles
‘Internationalizing Scottish Poetry.’ in C. Craig, ed., The History of Scottish Literature, Vol. IV (Aberdeen University Press, 1987)
‘Carlyle: The World as Text and the Text as Voice.’ in D. Gifford, ed.,
The History of Scottish Literature, Vol. III (Aberdeen University Press, 1988)
‘‘The weight of joy... and the weight of sorrow.’ Dilemmas of ‘noticing’ and ‘balancing’ in the later poems of Norman MacCaig’ in J. Hendry, J. and R. Ross, eds., Critical Essays on Norman MacCaig (Edinburgh University Press, 1990)
‘Alien Voices from the Street: Demotic Modernism in modern Scottish writing’ in A. Gurr, ed., The Yearbook of English Studies 25: ‘Non-standard Englishes and the new media’ (The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1995)
‘The Rage of Caliban: the “Unacceptable” Face and the “Unspeakable” Voice in Contemporary Scottish Writing.’ in H. Drescher and S. Hagemann, eds., Scotland to Slovenia: European Identities and Transcultural Communication (Verlag Peter Lang, 1996)
‘Speaking in Tongues: reflections after Bakhtin on the Scots literary tradition and contemporary writing’ in A. Renfrew, ed., Exploiting Bakhtin (Strathclyde Modern Language Studies, New Series no. 2, 1997)
‘Edwin Morgan: Messages and Transformations’ in G. Day and B. Docherty, eds. British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s. Politics and Art (Macmillan, 1997)
‘“To know Being.” Substance and Spirit in the Work of Nan Shepherd’ in D. Gifford and D. Porter McMillan, eds. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 1997)
‘Postcolonial Subjects? Language, narrative authority and class in contemporary Scottish culture’ in The European English Messenger, VII, 2, pp. 21-31, Spring 1998
‘Old Clans: New Tribes? The Dis-integration of Centricity in Contemporary Scottish Culture’ in Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines : ‘L’Invention de la Tradition: l’experience et la périphérie Canada Écosse Irlande Galles, Ciaran Ross, Héliane Ventura, Christian Civardi, eds. XXX, 1997, pp. 97-122 (Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, 1999)
‘Carlyle: The World as Text and the Text as Voice’ in J. Witalec, ed.,
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (Gale Research, 1999)
The Double Tongue’, in Translation and Literature, Stuart Gillespie, ed., Vol. 9, part 2, pp. 175-8, 2000.
‘“You cannot fight me with a word”: The Master of Ballantrae and the wilderness beyond dualism’, The Journal of Stevenson Studies, E. Massie, ed., Vol 1, pp. 1-23, 2004
‘Living with the double tongue: contemporary poetry in Scots’, in I. Brown, T. Clancy, S. Manning and M. Pittock, eds., The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Volume Three: Modern Transformations: New Identities (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)
‘“Death’s Proletariat”: Scottish Poets of the Second World War’, in T. Kendall, ed., The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, (Oxford University Press, 2007)
‘“The unrest and movement of our century”: the universe of The Wrecker, in The Journal of Stevenson Studies, guest editors A. Colley, M. Danahay, vol 4, Centre for Scottish Studies, University of Stirling, 2007.
‘The Scottish Literary Renaissance’, in New Dictionary of National Biography, 2,800 words (in print and on line) Oxford University Press
Other output
The Penguin Book of the Bicycle with Martin Gray (Penguin 1978; reprinted, 1984); trans as El Libro de la Bicicleta H. Blume Ediciones (Madrid 1980)
Seventeen Poems of Edwin Morgan: A Commentary–volume 1, with readings by Edwin Morgan, audio CD (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1986)
Twenty-three Poems of Edwin Morgan: A Commentary–volume 2 with readings by Edwin Morgan audio CD (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2005)
Forthcoming
'The Modern Scottish Literary Renaissance: Counter Discourses of Identity’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, Ian Brown and Alan Riach, eds., (Edinburgh University Press, 2009?)
‘MacDiarmid and International Modernism’ in Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. by Margery McCulloch and Scott Lyall (Edinburgh University Press, 2011?)
‘Stevenson and Modernism’ in Approaches to Teaching Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, proposed for MLA Publications.