The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature

This book addresses the poetics of space and place in Scottish literature. Focusing chiefly on twentieth- and twenty-first century texts, with acknowledgement of historical and philosophical contexts, the essays address representation, narrative form, the work of the poetic, perception and experience. Major genres and forms are discussed, and authors as diverse as George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Ken McLeod and Kei Miller are presented through theoretically informed, historically contextualized close readings. Additionally considering the role of dialect and region in the poetry and fiction of modern Scotland, the volume argues for an appreciation of the cultural diversity of Scottish writers while highlighting the overarching presence of a connection between self and world, subject and place within Scottish literature.

Auteur

Monika Szuba is Lecturer in English with the University of Gdask, Poland. Her research covers twentieth- and twenty-first century Scottish and English poetry and prose, with a particular interest in ecocriticism, informed by the Environmental Humanities. She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson, White (forthcoming). She is co-editor, with Julian Wolfreys, of Reading Victorian Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller (forthcoming).

Julian Wolfreys is an independent scholar, UK, and the author or editor of more than forty books, most recently Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture: 1800-Present (Palgrave 2018).

Contenu

Introduction: The Proximity of Scotland

Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys

I Contested Beginnings

Location and Destination in Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's 'The Birlinn of Clanranald'

Alan Riach

Troubled Inheritances in R. L. Stevenson's Kidnapped and Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Priory School

Tom Ue

II Essaying Place: Fiction and Non-Fiction Prose Representations

From Dramatic Space to Narrative Place: George Mackay Brown's Time in a Red Coat

Paul Barnaby

The Empty Places: Northern Archipelagos in Scottish Fiction

John Brannigan

'Keep looking, even when there's nothing much to see': Reimagining Scottish Landscapes in Kathleen Jamie's Non-Fiction

Ewa Chodnikiewicz

Greenock-Outer Space: Place and Space in Ken McLeod's The Human Front and Descent

Jessica Aliaga Lavriisen

III Figuring Land, Figuring Self: Poetics

'The Wider Rootedness': John Burnside's Embodied Sense of Place

Monika Szuba

'Under the Saltire Flag': Kei Miller's Spatial Negotiations of Identity

Bartosz Wójcik

A World of Islands: Archipelagic Poetics in Modern Scottish Literature

Alexandra Campbell

From 'Pictish Artemis' to 'Tay Moses': Visions of the River Tay in Some Contemporary Scottish Poems

Robin MacKenzie

Derick Thomson's An Rathad Cian (The Far Road, 1970):

Modern Gaelic Poetry of Place between Introspection and Politics

Petra Johana Poncarová

Glaswegian and Dundonian: Twa Mither Tongues Representing the Place and Space of Tom Leonard and Mark Thomson

Aniela Korzeniowska

Take the Weather with You: Robin Robertson's Northeast Atmospherics of Landscape and Self

Julian Wolfreys

IV Afterword: from word to image

Jon Schueler (1916-1992): Intensity and Identity

Mary Ann Caws