The Righteousness of Life

Rather than emphasizing William Soutar's role as a major protagonist of the Scottish Renaissance - a role which has gained greater recognition in recent years -, the author, in this study of William Soutar's life and work, has chosen to listen to the voice of a great visionary searching for meaning and wholeness in a disunited and unstable world. Taking Soutar's philosophy of the Righteousness of Life as a starting point, she traces his reflections on creative writing, death, religion, pacifism and other related spheres and establishes fully, for the first time, the width of this Scottish writer's philosophic range. By drawing upon the treasure of Soutar's private papers, she reveals a facet of his work which glows with the intense presence of his observations on concerns that are still fundamental for our understanding of modern society and politics.

Autorentext

The Author: Heidelinde Prüger, who is currently working on her Ph.D. at the University of Klagenfurt, has specialized in the fields of Scottish and Austrian literature. Born in 1973, she graduated with an M.A. from Klagenfurt and has additionally studied and carried out research at the universities of Vienna and Edinburgh. Further areas of interest include minority groups and dialect varieties. Heidelinde is also a poet and has translated William Soutar's Seeds in the Wind from Scots into Viennese.

Inhalt
Contents: The diaries and the poetry of William Soutar - Cultural, political, biographical roots and background - Soutar's philosophy of life - Soutar, the diarist - The pacifist - Soutar's concern with death, religion, solitariness, community, antisyzygy.