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Frederick Douglass (1818–95) was not the only fugitive from American slavery to visit Scotland before the Civil War, but he was the best known and his impact was far-reaching. In 1846 his stunning oratory drew enthusiastic crowds from Ayr to Aberdeen who came to hear him promote his new autobiography and deliver the abolitionist message. Although the main part of the book is framed by accounts of the racist discrimination Douglass faced on both his outward and return sea voyages, it does not offer a chronological narrative of his speaking engagements in Scotland. Rather, each of the three central chapters focus on a different set of encounters with notable Scots in order to demonstrate the vital role they played in the transformation of Douglass from a subordinate envoy of a white-run abolitionist society to an independent antislavery campaigner in his own right. In particular, they prompted far-reaching changes in his styles of speaking and writing, in his choice of heroes and how he identified with them, and in the new fervour with which he attempted to control the way he was represented verbally and pictorially. Situated at the intersection of biography, history and literature, it applies literary techniques of close reading to materials normally treated as historical documents, such as letters and newspaper reports, in order to draw out the subtleties of Douglass's changing attitudes, ideas and affiliations.

This is the first book to look at poets’ letters as an art form. Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth. Divided into three sections—Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing and Twentieth-Century Letter Writing—the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure that virtual post struggles to replicate.

The Siege of Malta and Bizarro are Scott's final works, written in Malta and Italy at the end of 1831 and the beginning of 1832. Although extracts from The Siege of Malta have been published, this is the first complete edition. Bizarro has not been available in print until now. The Siege of Malta begins as a novel but ends as a historical account of the extraordinary defence of Malta by the Order of St John of Jerusalem and their Maltese helpers against much larger Muslim forces. It is an epic tale of endurance, resulting in inevitable defeat for some of the Knights, and for the rest, in the most hard won of victories, setting the scene for the subsequent development of the Maltese nation. In the novella Bizarro, Scott takes up the story of a notorious Calabrian brigand of the early nineteenth century. His fictionalised account draws on his experience of visiting Naples and its surroundings, and on his earlier knowledge of Neapolitan history, to tell a tale of passion, murder, and revenge with a level of violence rarely seen in his earlier work. Though incomplete, Bizarro shows that Scott had not lost the power to tell a good story in this, his very last piece of fiction.