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Exhibition catalog for a showing of Alasdair Gray's works at the Coningsby Gallery in London.
Alasdair Gray’s writing, and in particular his great novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), is often read as a paradigm of postmodern practice. This study challenges that view by presenting an analysis that is at once more conventional and more strongly radical. By reading Gray in his cultural and intellectual context, and by placing him within the tradition of a Scottish history of ideas that has been largely neglected in contemporary critical writing, Gavin Miller re-opens contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity. Scottish social anthropology and psychiatry (including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing) can be seen as formative influences on Gray’s anti-essentialist vision of Scotland as a mosaic of communities, and of our social need for recognition, acknowledgement and the common life.
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The prominence of the term 'Postmodernism' in critical responses to the work of Alasdair Gray has often appeared at odds with Gray's own writing, both in his commitment to seemingly non-postmodernist concerns and his own repeatedly stated rejection of the label. In order to better understand Gray's relationship to postmodernism, this thesis begins by outlining Gray's reservations in this regard. Principally, this is taken as the result of his concerns over the academic appropriation of his work, and his suggestion that 'postmodernism' is an entity wholly constructed and primarily active within critical theory, with a tendency to elide the political dimension of literature under its own assum...
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