Oliver Robinson-Sivyer

Oliver Robinson-Sivyer is an independent researcher. He holds an MA with distinction in Crime and Gothic Fictions from Bath Spa University, where he developed his specialism in the Scottish Gothic mode and wrote a dissertation examining Irvine Welsh’s devolutionary Scottish Gothic Fictions. His current research will support a future Ph.D. in Scottish Gothic and also led to a previous publication with the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2019.

Urban Decay, the Body Politic and Working-Class Scotland in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993)

June 2026June 2026 | By Oliver Robinson-Sivyer

Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) erupted onto the British cultural scene during the turbulent years leading to Scottish devolution, a period marked by uncertainty over Scotland’s political identity and future. Set primarily in the working-class urban area of Leith during the post-Thatcher era, and praised for its expression of political nihilism and the Caledonian antisyzygy, the novel’s representation […]

‘The hour approaches, Tam maun ride’: Tam o’ Shanter and the Uncanny Scottish Gothic

July 2023 | By Oliver Robinson-Sivyer

When Horace Walpole discredited the Fragments of ancient poetry (1760) – a ‘found’ manuscript purportedly written by Ossian and published by James Macpherson – only to then publish his own ‘found’ manuscript four years later, the Gothic literary aesthetic became a nationalist battleground. In ‘The Politics and Poetics of the “Scottish Gothic” from Ossian to […]

‘[…] a distant country from which I now live’ – Walter Scott, the voiceless, and Blackwood’s Highland Gothic

December 2021January 2024 | By Oliver Robinson-Sivyer

The study of Scottish Gothic has been dominated, almost inevitably, by the presence of the 1707 Act of Union. This essentially political event embodies cultural implications whose persistence has affected not merely those fictions historically written out of Scotland but also the critical interpretations imposed upon them from the eighteenth century to the present day. […]

“It’s an unco place, the Bass”: A Scottish EcoGothic interrogation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’

July 2019January 2024 | By Oliver Robinson-Sivyer

Nick Groom, in his article considering the Celtic roots of a Scottish Gothic, states that its Scot-Celtic past evolves from ‘antiquarianism, racial politics and national identity, and, as such, the terms [Celt and the Celtic] are not dissimilar to “Goths” and the “Gothic”.’ This Celticism, whilst akin to Gothic imaginings, also has a rooted tradition […]