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A History of Scottish Literature

A History of Scottish Literature: Episode 5: Twa Corbies and Tartan Noir

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Episode 5

Episode 5: Twa Corbies and Tartan Noir

Twa Corbies and Tartan Noir

BBC Radio Scotland - A History of Scottish Literature, Twa Corbies and Tartan Noir

Billy Kay explores the dark side of Scotland's literature from ballads to tartan noir.

Billy Kay traces Scottish literature from its origins to the present. He explores the dark side of Scotland's literature from ballads and gothic horror to tartan noir.

For Halloween Billy Kay enters the dark realm of literature with writers like James Robertson, Andrew Greig, and Sheena Blackhall. We celebrate the supernatural in eerie tales such as R.L. Stevenson's Thrawn Janet and The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We explore the fey, other worldly shimmer of the minstrelsy of the Scottish border and the relish for blood letting in iconic ballads like The Twa Corbies. It became popular in Russia through Pushkin's translation and we hear a contemporary echo of it in Liz Lochhead's performance of the Corbie's speech from her play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. 

Murray Pittock comments on the outsiders' image of Scotland as a place where the supernatural was close to hand, and how Scottish writers adopted this and ran with it brilliantly in their writing. We look at doppelgangers and divided selves in James Hogg's masterpiece The Confessions of a Justified Sinner which languished for almost a century until the French writer André Gide discovered it and declared its genius to the world. We explore Scotland as a setting for Gothic tales with Dracula's creator Bram Stoker's stay at Slains Castle and Mary Shelley writing that Frankenstein was born "on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee." Did Edgar Allan Poe get his taste for the Gothic during a childhood sojourn in Irvine at the height of the body snatching epidemic in the early 19th century? We bring the story up to date and discuss the vicarious thrill of crime fiction and tartan noir along with Val McDermid, William McIlvanney and the author of The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh. At the end we discover which Scottish author was being read by Goebbels and Hitler in the bunker just before the downfall.

BBC Radio Scotland

Billy Kay celebrates Scottish literature and its importance to national identity.

Billy Kay traces Scottish literature from its origins in Celtic myths to its role in creating national identity.

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Episode 5: Twa Corbies and Tartan Noir

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