George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community


Book Description

In this book Timothy C. Baker situates George Mackay Brown's work within a broad literary and philosophical context to articulate how his novels engage with the question of community.




George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination


Book Description

This lively new study is the very first book to offer an absorbing history of the uncharted territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and creative vision. By focusing on one of the best known of Scotland's literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown's writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. The book provides sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown's corpus and includes detailed comparisons between Brown's writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Flannery O'Connor.This timely book reveals that Brown's Catholic imagination extended far beyond the 'small green world' of Orkney and ultimately embraced a universal human experience.




George MacKay Brown


Book Description

George Mackay Brown is one of the 20th century's finest writers. This biography sweeps us along on an enriching literary and spiritual journey..Draws on unpublished letters, conversations with the enigmatic Bard's friends and well-known writers. Shortlisted for the Saltire Award Best Research Book of the Year.




Community in Modern Scottish Literature


Book Description

Community in Modern Scottish Literature is the first book to examine representations and theories of community in Scottish writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across a broad range of authors and from various conceptual perspectives. The leading scholars in the field examine work in the novel, poetry, and drama, by key Scottish authors such as MacDiarmid, Kelman, and Galloway, as well as less well known writers. This includes postmodern and postcolonial readings, analysis of writing by gay and Gaelic authors, alongside theorists of community such as Nancy, Bauman, Delanty, Cohen, Blanchot, and Anderson. This book will unsettle and yet broaden traditional conceptions of community in Scotland and Scottish literature, suggesting a more plural idea of what community might be.




The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature


Book Description

This book addresses the poetics of space and place in Scottish literature. Focusing chiefly on twentieth- and twenty-first century texts, with acknowledgement of historical and philosophical contexts, the essays address representation, narrative form, the work of the poetic, perception and experience. Major genres and forms are discussed, and authors as diverse as George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Ken McLeod and Kei Miller are presented through theoretically informed, historically contextualized close readings. Additionally considering the role of dialect and region in the poetry and fiction of modern Scotland, the volume argues for an appreciation of the cultural diversity of Scottish writers while highlighting the overarching presence of a connection between self and world, subject and place within Scottish literature.




Mediating Peace


Book Description

This volume examines the role and contributions of art, music and film in peace-building and reconciliation, offering a distinctive approach in various forms of art in peace-building in a wide range of conflict situations, particularly in religiously plural contexts. As such, it provides readers with a comprehensive perspective on the subject. The contributors are composed of prominent scholars and artists who examine theoretical, professional and practical perspectives and debates, and address three central research questions, which form the theoretical basis of this project: namely, ‘In what way have particular forms of art enhanced peace-building in conflict situations?’, ‘How do artistic forms become a public demonstration and expression of a particular socio-political context?’, and ‘In what way have the arts played the role of catalyst for peace-building, and, if not, why not?’ This volume demonstrates that art contributes in conflict and post-conflict situations in three main ways: transformation at an individual level; peace-building between communities; and bridging justice and peace for sustainable reconciliation.




The Fiction of Robin Jenkins


Book Description

The Fiction of Robin Jenkins is the first ever volume of essays dedicated to Robin Jenkins (1912-2005), hailed by Andrew Marr as ‘the best-kept secret in Modern British Literature’, and by the Scotsman in 2000 as ‘the greatest living fiction-writer in Scotland [...] the Scottish Thomas Hardy’. This new study of Jenkins includes essays across his entire, astonishingly varied body of work. It includes provocative new readings of a range of thematic issues by established experts on Jenkins and on Scottish Literature more broadly. This volume also includes chapters dedicated to individual novels in Jenkins’s corpus, including his best-known work, The Cone-Gatherers, as well as The Changeling, Fergus Lamont, and his posthumous novel, The Pearl Fishers. Contributors: Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Timothy C. Baker, Linden Bicket, Gerard Carruthers, Cairns Craig, Douglas Gifford, Michael Lamont, Margery Palmer McCulloch, Isobel Murray, Glenda Norquay, Alan Riach, David Robb, Bernard Sellin, Gavin Wallace.




Cosmopolitan Novel


Book Description

While traditionally the novel has been seen as tracking the development of the nation state, Schoene queries if globalisation might currently be prompting the emergence of a new sub-genre of the novel that is adept at imagining global community. The book introduces a new generation of contemporary British writers (Rachel Cusk, Kiran Desai, Hari Kunzru, Jon McGregor and David Mitchell) whose work is read against that of established novelists Arundhati Roy, James Kelman and Ian McEwan. Each chapter explores a different theoretical key concept, including 'glocality', 'glomicity', 'tour du monde', 'connectivity' and 'compearance'. Key Features:* Defines the new genre of the 'cosmopolitan novel' by reading contemporary British fiction as responsive to new global socio-economic formations* Expands knowledge of world culture, national identity, literary creativity and political agency by introducing concepts from globalisation and cosmopolitan theory into literary studies * Explores debates on Britishness and 'the contemporary' with close reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9/11/1989 and the World Trade Centre attacks on 11/9/2001 * Introduces a new generation of British writers within a complex global context by drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's work on community and creative world-formation




Time in a Red Coat


Book Description

Bestowed at birth with two gifts, an ivory flute and a bag of silver and gold coins, a young girl wanders through time.She is destined to pursue the dragon of war and before he consumes the world in flames, subdue him not with violence but music. Moving across the battlefields from East to West, the girl bears witness to the suffering and brutality of war throughout history ...




Kathleen Jamie


Book Description

Analyses media representations of riots, strikes and protests