The Caledonian Antisyzygy: Origins, Legacy and Solution of a Paradox with Dr. Paul Malgrati

This presentation considers the intellectual origins and legacy of the founding concept of Scottish literary scholarship: Gregory Smith's 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' (1918). Defining Scottish culture as a 'zigzag of contradictions', a yin-yang between 'Celtic' imagination and 'Saxon' realism, Smith's notion built on 80 years of effort to accommodate Celtic identity within the dialectic of Britain's composite Empire. Indeed, the works of Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Robert Louis Stevenson, Patrick Geddes, and fin-de-siecle Theosophists, all influenced by German Idealism and the Hegelian dialectic, shaped the Celtic/Saxon paradox in a way that justified Scotland's role as a leading imperial nation. Systematised by Smith, Scotland's paradox was then used by Hugh MacDiarmid and other twentieth-century modernists as the key to advocating an aggressive, all-encompassing form of Scottish power. This paper reflects on such a problematic, imperialist grounding for Scottish literary scholarship. However, it does not dwell on such criticism. After considering the failure of Scottish postmodernism in defusing Smith's paradox, the conclusion will attempt an original, decolonial, and materialist escape from this Caledonian zigzag.

Paul is a Franco-Scottish poet and Lecturer of Northern Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. In 2020, he completed his award-winning PhD on Robert Burns at the University of St Andrews, which was turned into a book and published in 2023 by Edinburgh University Press under the title Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics, 1914–2014: The Bard of Contention. In 2022, Paul also published his debut poetry collection, Poèmes Ecossais with the Edinburgh publisher Blue Diode Press. Shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, this is believed to be the first book of poems in Scots by a non-native Anglophone. Since then, Paul has been working with Donna Heddle on an edited volume about Franco-Scottish relations in literature (Brill, 2026) and on a new edition of Alan Sharp’s A Green Tree in Gedde (ASLS, 2026). He is also working on a second monograph on Scottish literary theory.

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