Prismatic Modernities: Towards a Re-Contextualization of Scottish Modernism (original) (raw)
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Adaptive Modernism and Beyond: Towards a Poetics of a New Scotland
Culture Crossroads, 2022
The idea of a 'New Scotland' , and the role of 'New Scots' in it, is being debated critically. This essay contextualises this debate with reference to historical antecedents contemporary protagonists draw on, sometimes extensively. It introduces the Scottish Renaissance, which can be regarded as an expression of 'adaptive' modernism. The Scottish Folk Revival after the Second World War, as a form of 'adaptive' modernism, shares the key concerns of that Renaissance, connecting with it through the Carrying Stream (Hamish Henderson). The two movements share more than their ethnological foundations, a focus on language and identity, and a generalist interest in civic improvement. Reflecting on the significance of heritages, authenticity, resources, and sustainability in this context, the discussion concludes with an appraisal of the (anti-)modern/post-modern ethnopoesis at work in contemporary Scotland.
Reconstructing the future: contemporary Scottish literature and the nation
Etudes Ecossaises 20, 2018, https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/1416 This article examines the recent development in Scottish literature and criticism, away from the critical commonplace that describes how Scottish culture has, in the decades since the 1979 referendum, been aligned with Scottish nationalism. Starting from the definitions of nationalism given by Michael Billig, Michael Ignatieff, Ernest Renan, and the analyses of Scottish historians and cultural nationalists, it shows how what it calls the “representational trope” is at last being abandoned. This renewal of our critical perspective involves looking at the various ways the future can be envisaged, and at the variety of responses to what Riach describes as the fundamental goal for the arts—to further our understanding of our common humanity. Those responses involve for artists the necessity to (re)construct the future rather than to represent the people. By focusing on the works of artists such as James Kelman, James Robertson, Alan Riach, Tom Leonard, Jackie Kay and Kathleen Jamie, but also on some artists’ comments on an independent Scotland, and by using the theoretical framework of Jacques Rancière’s politics of literature, his notions of the various modes of identification for the arts, and of the partition of the sensible, the paper traces the way that Scottish writers today engage with a renewed, more fluid myth of Scotland, and focuses on literature’s capacity to build what Rancière describes as the hermeneutics of the social body.
The invention of Scottish literature during the long eighteenth century
2001
The Invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century" examines the limited place in the canon traditionally allowed to creative writing in Scotland during this period and the overarching reading of creative impediment applied to it in the light of Scotland's fraught and not easily to be homogenised national history and identity. It interrogates the dominant mode of what it terms the Scottish literary critical tradition and finds this tradition to have many shortcomings as a result of its prioritising of literary and cultural holism. In examining the Scots poetry revival of the eighteenth century the thesis challenges the traditional identification of a populist and beset mode, and finds eighteenth-century poetry in Scots to be actually much more catholic in its literary connections. These more catholic "British" connections are reappraised alongside the distinctively Scottish accents of the poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. The poetry of James Thomson, it is also argued, fits more easily into a heterogeneous Scottish identity than is sometimes thought and the work of Thomson is connected with the poets in Scots to show a network of influence and allegiance which is more coherent than has been traditionally allowed. Similarly, the primitivist agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment in creative literature is examined to demonstrate the way in which this provides license for reclaiming elements of the historically fraught or "backward" Scottish identity (thus an essentially conservative, patriotic element within the Scottish Enlightenment cultural voice is emphasised). Also, with the writers of poetry in Scots, as well as with Thomson, and with those whose work comes under the intellectual sponsorship of Enlightenment primitivism such as Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson, James Beattie and others we chart a movement from the age of Augustanism and neoclassicism to that of sensibility and proto-Romanticism. From Bums's work to that of Walter Scott, John Galt and James Hogg we highlight Scottish writers making creative capital from the difficult and fractured Scottish identity and seeing this identity as, in part, reflecting cultural tensions and fractures which are more widely coined furth of their own country. The connecting threads of the thesis are those narratives in Scottish literature of the period which show the retrieval and analysis of seemingly lost or receding elements of Scottish identity. Creative innovation and re-energisation rather than surrender and loss are what the thesis finally diagnoses in Scottish literature of the long eighteenth century. Contents. Introduction. pp. 1-4. Chapter One. The Modern Making of the Scottish Literary Canon and the Problem of the Long Eighteenth Century pp. 5-47. Chapter Two. "Fashion of Words and Wit may Change, /And Rob in part their fame ": Allan Ramsay and the Formation of Poetry in Scots in the Early Eighteenth Century pp. 48-89. Chapter Three. "My trembling muse your honour does address/That its a bold attempt most humbly I confess ": James Thomson and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literary Identity pp. 90-119. Chapter Four. " 'Mang men, wae's-heart! we aft en find/The brawest dress want peace of mind ": Robert Fergusson and High Scots Cultural Complaint pp. 120-164. Chapter Five. "Rugged her soil, and rugged was her shore, /yet she gained a name/That stands unrivall'd in the rolls of fame ": The Anti-Canon of the Scottish Enlightenment pp. 165-220. Chapter Six. Robert Burns: "Doing honour to our language, our nation and our species. " pp. 221-276. Chapter Seven. "Circumstances which the Author has not been able to persuade himself to retract or cancel ": The Scottish Novel in the Early Nineteenth Century pp. 277-319. Conclusion. pp. 320-322. Bibliography. pp. 323-337. ' An earlier version of a small part of the material in this chapter appeared as "The Construction of the Scottish Critical Tradition" in Neil McMillan and Kirsten Stirling (eds), Odd Alliances (Glasgow, 1999), pp. 52-65.
The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 7, British and Irish Fiction Since 1940, 2016
This chapter examines the genuine boom in Scottish literary fiction during the 1980s and -90s, and the rhetoric of its presentation as a ‘new renaissance’. With this label came remarkably strong claims for the political efficacy of the contemporary literary novel, a phenomenon that has not attracted the interest it deserves from literary historians outside Scotland. In the two decades prior to devolution, the emergence of formally ambitious Scottish novelists including Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Iain Banks, A.L. Kennedy, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Andrew O’Hagan and Alan Warner sponsored a conflation of fiction and democracy which figured the novel as the locus of national self-representation and re-invention – as Scotland’s ‘real’ parliament prior to, and in some sense leading to, the establishment of Holyrood in 1999. While there is clear evidence of these writers’ influence on the self-image of post-devolution Scotland, a closer examination of their fiction and its staging of ‘Scottishness’ complicates any straightforward affiliation with cultural nationalism. The ‘new renaissance’ discourse, I suggest, both inflates the social impact of these novelists and delimits the politics of their writing to the display of suppressed ‘identity’.
The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature
2012
Scotland's rich literary tradition is a product of its unique culture and landscape, as well as of its long history of inclusion and resistance to the United Kingdom. Scottish literature includes masterpieces in three languages-English, Scots and Gaelic-and global perspectives from the diaspora of Scots all over the world. This Companion offers a unique introduction, guide and reference work for students and readers of Scottish literature from the pre-medieval period to the post-devolution present. Essays focus on key periods and movements (the Scottish Enlightenment, Scottish Romanticism and the Scottish Renaissance), genres (the historical novel, Scottish Gothic, 'Tartan Noir') and major authors (Burns, Scott, Stevenson, MacDiarmid and Spark). A chronology and guides to further reading in each chapter make this an ideal overview of a national literature that continues to develop its own distinctive style.