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There is only one argument for Scottish independence: the cultural argument. It was there long before North Sea oil had been discovered, and it will be here long after the oil has run out. How have perceptions of Scottish culture been shaped by its role within Britain? What would be different about culture in an Independent Scotland? Why is culture the key to the independence debate? ALEXANDER MOFFAT and ALAN RIACH take a hard look at the most neglected aspect of the argument for Scotland's distinctive national identity: the arts. Their proposition is that music, painting, architecture and, pre-eminently, literature, are the fuel and fire that makes imagination possible. Neglect them at your...
Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) is one of the giants of modern poetry. Scotland's national poet from 2004 to his death in 2010, in his long life he produced an incredible range of work, from the playful to the profound. This INTERNATIONAL COMPANION gives a comprehensive overview of Morgan's poetry and drama. A range of expert contributors guide the reader along Morgan's astonishing, multi-faceted trajectory through space and time, and provide students with an essential and accessible general introduction to his life and work.
This fascinating new study is about cultural change and continuities. At the core of the book are discrete literary studies of Scotland and Shakespeare, Walter Scott, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the modern Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and more recent cultural and literary phenomena. The central theme of literature and popular 'representation' recontextualises literary analysis in a broader, multi-faceted picture involving all the arts and the changing sense of what 'the popular' might be in a modern nation. New technologies alter forms of cultural production and the book charts a way through these forms, from oral poetry and song to the novel, and includes studies of paintings, classical music, socialist drama, TV, film and comic books. The international context for mass media cultural production is examined as the story of the intrinsic curiosity of the imagination and the intensely local aspect of Scotland's cultural self-representation unfolds.
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A panorama of ideas about nationality and culture, Arts and the Nation arose from the conviction that Scotland can never be really democratic until it gives the arts the priority of place and attention they demand. This book is a fresh take on subjects new and old, with multifaceted ideas of nationality and culture. Those featured include: William Dunbar, Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Elizabeth Melville are read alongside international authors such as Wole Soyinka and Edward Dorn. J.D. Fergusson, Joan Eardley and John Bellany are considered with American Alice Neel and the art of the ancient Celts. Composers like John Blackwood McEwen, Cecil Coles and Helen Hopekirk are introduced, amongst discus...
A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This impo...
Alan Riach's The MacDiarmid Memorandum is a work of epic, category-defying scope; blending biography and national history, poetry and prose; an intimate portrait of an old friend and mentor, and a political manifesto calling for revolution. Riach's poems begin with MacDiarmid's childhood in Langholm and his first attempts to navigate the Scottish landscape. We travel from the Borders to Shetland, from Edinburgh to rural Lanarkshire. The poems map a nation where nature is inseparable from political history. They explore a peculiarly Scottish kind of consciousness, willing itself to be free yet bowed under the weight of self-suppression. There is confrontation on various fronts. MacDiarmid exp...
Homecoming puts Scotland in touch with the wider world, particularly fitting as the country prepares to welcome back its sons and daughters in a year-long celebration. Riach, himself a returned ex-pat, finds common humanity at home and abroad with a new book of inspired poetry carefully arranged in five sections, from the opening preludes to the diverse landscapes of Scotland, from Orkney to the Borders. Riach guides the reader around the globe from New Zealand through China to Mexico, Istanbul and Helsinki before returning home to Scotland in the final section, and the crux of the collection. In over 80 engaging poems, diverse in form and subject matter, Riach observes life with a poignancy, clarity and sometimes a hard edge that has earned him the reputation as one of the finest poets of his generation. Homecoming also includes beautiful original illustrations by artist Alexander Moffat.
This text examines the lives and work of leading figures from Scotland's arts world in the 20th century, concentrating on poets and artists but also including writers, musicians and architectural visionaries such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Patrick Geddes.
In 1939, Scottish artist and sculptor J.D. Fergusson was commissioned to write a fully illustrated book on modern Scottish painting. The Second World War made this difficult and the first edition of Modern Scottish Painting was published in 1943 without illustrations. This new edition – edited, introduced and annotated by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach – finally brings Fergusson's project to fruition, illustrating the argument with colour reproductions of Fergusson's own work. Moffat and Riach frame Fergusson's important art manifesto for the 21st-century reader, illuminating his views on modern art as he explores questions of technique, education, form and what it means for a painting to be truly modern. Fergusson relates these aspects of modern painting to Scottishness, showing what they mean for Scottish identity, nationalism, independence and the legacy that puritanical Calvinism has left on Scottish art – a particular concern for Fergusson given his recurring subject matter of the female nude.