Adoption, Adaptation, Reformation: Transnational narratives and their audiences in 'Renaissance' Scotland

The pre-1603 'Golden Age' of Scottish literature produced provocative texts whose intellectual and meta-fictional complexity indicates sophisticated authors and audiences. Scottish authors adapted Continental texts in ways that encouraged readers' participation in developing textual meaning, while simultaneously directing them towards implied interpretations. This author-audience interaction, however, remains unexamined. My research assesses how selected texts addressed their audiences' capacity for critical engagement, evolving a dialogical mode of interpretation, and examines the assimilation of European-Scottish cultures into the confident vernacular literature espoused by the works of Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, and John Stewart, which - to this day - distinguishes a national textual community