Margaret Holford’un Wallace; or, The Fight of Falkirk adlı Eserinde İskoç İkonunun Destansı Tasviri

Year 2021, , 508 - 521, 15.12.2021

Okaycan Dürükoğlu

https://doi.org/10.32600/huefd.801827

Abstract

Margaret Holford (1778-1852), eserlerini 1809 ve 1838 yılları arasında sürekli olarak yayınlayan bir İngiliz şair, çevirmen ve romancıydı. Holford on dokuzuncu yüzyılın başlarında üretken bir yazar olarak kabul edilebilecek olsa da eserleri bugünün kanonunda kendine yer bulamadı ve Viktorya öncesi dönemin unutulmuş kadın şairlerinden biri oldu. Holford, The Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk adlı eserinde İskoç vatansever ve İskoçya Muhafızı olarak bilinen William Wallace'ın son günlerini anlattı. Bu makale, destan türünün özelliklerini barındırdığı için Holford’un eserini bir destan örneği olarak incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Holford’un eserinin analizi, erkek egemen destan türüne kadınların katılımı konusuna önemli bir bakış açısı sağlar. Örgün eğitimden ve entelektüel yeteneklerden yoksun oldukları varsayıldıkları için kadınların destansı bir şiir yazamayacakları düşünülse de on dokuzuncu yüzyılın başlarında uzun kahramanlık şiirleri üreten küçük bir grup kadın şair vardı ve Holford da onlardan biriydi. Bu açıdan bakıldığında, bu çalışmanın temel amacı, Margaret Holford’un eserinin hangi açılardan destan türünün bir örneği olduğunu göstermektir. Makale, daha geniş bir perspektiften, iki yüzyılı aşkın süredir bir kadın şair olarak ihmal edilen Holford’un kadın yazınına yaptığı katkıların altını çizmeyi amaçlamaktadır.

Keywords

Margaret Holford, Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk, destan, kadın şair, Viktorya Öncesi dönemi

Epic Portrayal of the Scottish Icon: Margaret Holford’s Wallace; or, The Fight of Falkirk

Abstract

Margaret Holford (1778-1852) was an English poet, translator, and novelist who continuously published her works between the years 1809 and 1838. Although Holford can be considered as a prolific writer in the early nineteenth century, her works do not find a place in today’s canon and she has become one of the forgotten women poets of the Pre-Victorian period. In The Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk, she recounted the last days of William Wallace who was a Scottish patriot and a Guardian of Scotland. This article aims to analyze Holford’s poem as an example of an epic poem since she employs the characteristics of the epic genre in her work. The analysis of Holford’s work provides an important insight into the issue of women’s participation in the male-dominated epic genre. Although it was believed that women were not capable of writing epic poems in terms of their lack of formal education and intellectual capacity, there was a small group of women poets who produced long heroic poems in the early nineteenth century and Holford was one of them. From this vantage point, the fundamental purpose of this study is to show to what extent Margaret Holford’s poem epitomizes the epic genre. In a broader perspective, the paper aims to underline the contributions of Holford, who has been pushed to the margins for more than two centuries, to women’s writing.

Keywords

Margaret Holford, Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk, epic, woman poet, Pre-Victorian period

References

• Aristotle. (1997). Poetics. New York: Dover.
• Anonymous. (1818). Wallace: Or, the Fight of Falkirk. [ Review of the poem Wallace, or; The Fight of Falkirk, by Margaret Holford]. Quarterly Review, 63-69.
• Anonymous. (1811). Wallace, or Fight of Falkirk [Review of the poem Wallace, or; The Fight of Falkirk, by Margaret Holford]. The American Review of History and Politics, 175-177.
• Anonymous. (1810). Wallace: or the Fight of Falkirk [Review of the poem Wallace, or; The Fight of Falkirk, by Margaret Holford]. The Literary Panorama: Being a Review of Books, Magazine of Varieties, 413-424.
• Byron, L. (1846). The poetical works of Lord Byron: Complete in One Volume. New York: D. Appleton.
• Crawford, R. (2014). Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and the literary imagination, 1314-2014. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
• Cuddon, J. A. (1991). The Penguin dictionary of literary terms and literary theory. London: Penguin.
• Curran, S. (1990). Poetic form and British Romanticism. New York: Oxford UP.
• Dixon, W. M. (1912). English epic and heroic poetry. New York: E. P. Dutton.
• Downes, J. M. (2014). Recursive desire: Rereading epic tradition. Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
• Dürükoğlu, O. (2019). Medievalist epics by an English woman poet: Margaret Holford’s Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk and Margaret of Anjou: A poem. (Master’s thesis, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey). Retrieved from http://www.openaccess.hacettepe.edu.tr:8080/xmlui/handle/11655/7410
• Eriksonas, L. (2011). Towards the genre of popular national history: Walter Scott after Waterloo. In S. Berger, L. Eriksonas, A. Mycock (Eds.), Narrating the nation: Representations in history, media and the arts, (pp. 117-131). New York: Berghahn Books.
• Fischer, H. (1991). Romantic verse narrative: The history of a genre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
• Friedman, S. (1986). Gender and genre anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. As epic poets. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 5(2), 203-228. doi:10.2307/463995
• Gaertner, J. F. (2001). The Homeric catalogues and their function in epic narrative. Hermes, 129(3), 298-305.
• Gamer, M. (1993). Marketing a masculine romance: Scott, Antiquarianism, and the Gothic. Studies in Romanticism, 32(4), 523-549. doi:10.2307/25601032
• Grant, A. (2007). Bravehearts and coronets: Images of William Wallace and the Scottish nobility. In Edward J. Cowan (Ed.), The Wallace Book (pp. 86-106). Edinburgh: John Donald.
• Greene, R, and Cushman, S. (Eds.) (2016) The Princeton handbook of poetic terms: Third edition. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press
• Holford, M. (1809). Wallace, or, the Fight of Falkirk; A metrical romance. London: Cadell and Davies.
• Hyland, P. (2016). Disguise On the early modern English stage. Surrey: Routledge.
• Johns-Putra, A. (2001). Heroes and Housewives: Women's Epic Poetry and Domestic Ideology in the Romantic Age, 1770-1835. Berlin: Peter Lang.
• Kraft-Todd, G. T., and Rand, D. G. (2017). Adaptive foundations of heroism: social heuristics push advantageous everyday ethical behavior to heroic extremes. In Scott T. Allison, George R. Goethals, Roderick M. Kramer (Eds.), Handbook of heroism and heroic leadership, (pp. 58-73). London: Routledge.
• Krueger, C. L. (Ed.) (2003) Encyclopaedia of British writers, 19th and 20th centuries. New York: Book Builders LLC.
• Mackay, J. (2007). William Wallace: Brave heart. Edinburgh, London: Mainstream.
• McGirr, E. M. (2007) Eighteenth-century characters: A Guide to the literature of the age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Miller, D. A. (2002). The epic hero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP.
• Moore, C. H. (1921). Prophecy in the Ancient Epic. Harvard studies in classical philology 32, 99-175.
• Murison, A. F.. (2003). William Wallace: Guardian of Scotland. New York: Dover Publications.
• Rogers, C. J. (2010). The Oxford encyclopaedia of Medieval Warfare and military technology volume 1. Oxford: Oxford UP.
• Slagle, J. B. (2010). Margaret Holford, Joanna Baillie, and the ‘Terrible Beauty’ of William Wallace. Keats-Shelley Journal, 59, 114-30.
• Slagle, J. B. (2012). Romantic appropriations of history: The legends of Joanna Baillie and Margaret Holford Hodson. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP.
• Smith, W. (1988). The disguises of the Gods in the Iliad. Numen 35, 1988, 161–178. doi:10.2307/3269970.
• Steinbach, S. (2005). Women in England 1760-1914: A social history. London: Phoenix. The Day That Changed Women's Education. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://london.ac.uk/day-changed-womens-education
• Tillyard, E. M. W. (1966). The English epic: And its background. Oxford University Press.
• Turner, F. (2017). Epic: form, content, and history. London: Routledge.
• Twain, M. (1950). Life on the Mississippi. New York: Harper & Brothers.