You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book focuses on James Kelman, a leading Scottish author, and his use of language. It examines how Kelman presents a spoken Glasgow working-class voice in his stories while breaking down the traditional distinction made between speech and writing in literature. Three main themes are explored: the use of Glaswegian/Scots language, the inclusion of working-class discourse features, and an expressive preference for spoken over written forms. Kelman’s writing is approached through an examination of his use of punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, swearing, and body language. Throughout, examples from Kelman’s writing are analysed and statistical comparisons are made between his writing and the Scots Corpus of Texts and Speech. In summary, the reader will find a detailed and systematic analysis of Kelman’s use of language in literature, showing linguistic patterns, identifying key textual strategies and features, and comparing these to the standards that precede him and those that surround his work.
In Literature and Truth Richard Lansdown continues a discussion concerning the truth-bearing status of imaginative literature that pre-dates Plato. The book opens with a general survey of contemporary approaches in philosophical aesthetics, and a discussion of the contribution to the question made by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in particular, in his Speculum Mentis. It then offers six case-studies from the Romantic era to the contemporary one as to how imaginative authors have variously dealt with bodies of discursive thought such as Stoicism, Christianity, evolution, humanism, and socialism. It concludes with a reading going in the other direction, in which the diary of Bronislaw Malinowski is seen in terms of the anthropologist’s reading habits during his legendary Trobriander fieldwork.
Provides a cultural history and political critique of Scottish devolutionProvides the first critical history of Scottish devolutionOffers the first multidisciplinary study of (UK or Scottish) devolution: engaging extensively with the work of historians, sociologists, political scientists and cultural theoristsCombines close attention to political and electoral factors with cultural issues and developments Draws on political theory which illuminates devolution from outside its terms This book is about the role of writers and intellectuals in shaping constitutional change. Considering an unprecedented range of literary, political and archival materials, it explores how questions of 'voice', language and identity featured in debates leading to the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. Tracing both the 'dream' of cultural empowerment and the 'grind' of electoral strategy, it reconstructs the influence of magazines such as Scottish International, Radical Scotland, Cencrastus and Edinburgh Review, and sets the fiction of William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, A. L. Kennedy and James Robertson within a radically altered picture of devolved Scotland.
None