By examining at length for the first time those places in Scotland that inspired MacDiarmid to produce his best poetry, Scott Lyall shows how the poet's politics evolved from his interaction with the nation, exploring how MacDiarmid discovered a hidden tradition of radical Scottish Republicanism through which he sought to imagine a new Scottish future. Adapting postcolonial theory, this book allows readers a fuller understanding not only of MacDiarmid's poetry and politics, but also of international modernism, and the social history of Scottish modernism.
This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly as hastened by the spectre of China in the First Opium War, Japan’s modernity was bound up with a convergence with British Newtonian cosmology, something underscored by the British presence in Meiji Japan and the British education of key Meiji state-makers. Moreover the thinking behind Britain’s own unification in the long eighteenth century, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, is echoed strikingly faithfully in the 1860s-70s work of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nakamura Masanao, and other writers in the ‘Japanese Enlightenment’. However, from around the end of the Meiji era, we can see a concerted and pointed response to this British universalism, its historiography, its basis in the sovereign individual subject, and its spatial mapping of the world. Elements of this response can be read in texts including Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo (Climate and Culture), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows), Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country), and various work of the mid-period Kyoto School. Rarely understood in terms of its British specificity, this response should have something to say to modernist studies more generally, since it aimed at a pluralism and de-universalisation that was difficult for mainstream British modernism itself. Indeed the strength of this de-universalisation may be precisely why these ‘native’ Japanese modernist tendencies have not much been accepted as modernism within the Anglophone academy, despite this field’s apparent widening of its ground in the twenty-first century.
Modernism is typically associated with novelty and urbanity. So what happens when poets identify small communities and local languages with the spirit of transnational modernity? Are vernacular poetries inherently provincial or implicitly xenophobic? How did modernist poets use vernacular language to re-imagine the relations between people, their languages, and the communities in which they live? Nations of Nothing But Poetry answers these questions through case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s. With a combination of fresh insights and attentive close readings, Matthew Hart presents a new theory of a "synthetic vernacular"-writing that explores the aesthetic and ideological tensions within modernism's dual commitments to the local and the global. The result is an invigorating contribution to the field of transnational modernist studies. Chapters focus on a mixture of canonical and non-canonical writers, combining new literary histories--such as the story of how Melvin B. Tolson, while a resident of Oklahoma, was appointed Poet Laureate of Liberia--with analyses of poems by Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. More broadly, the book reveals how the language of modernist poetry was shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of a world in which the nation-state continued to be a primary mediator of cultural and political identity, even as its authority was challenged as never before. Through deft juxtaposition, Hart develops a new interpretation of modernist poetry in English-one that disrupts the critical opposition between nationalism and the transnational, paving the way for a political history of modernist cosmopolitanism.
Literature After Euclid tells the story of the creative adaptation of geometry in Scotland during and after the long eighteenth century. Analyzing the work of Scottish literati, Matthew Wickman challenges how we perceive the Scottish Enlightenment and the modernist ethos that relegated "classical" Enlightenment to the dustbin of history.
The period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they began to fill up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life. New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars.
Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike. The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike, as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.
Though Henderson is a major figure in Scottish cultural history, his reputation is largely maintained in anecdote and song. This study describes the ambitious moral-intellectual programme to reintegrate the artist in society at the heart of all of his endeavors.
This book presents a comparative literary study of the works of four writers working in European minority languages - Frisian, Welsh, Scots and Breton. The author examines the different strategies employed by the four writers to create distinctive literary fields for their languages in the interwar era when self-determination had been promised to national minorities, finding that each had to make some degree of a step backwards into the past to enable them to make a leap forward. The book also discusses the problems resulting from this oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, drawing on concepts such as Pascale Casanova's 'littératures combatives' to make sense of these minority languages and communities within the wider European context. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages - particularly the four explored here - as well as twentieth-century and comparative literature, multilingualism, and language policy.
Archipelagic Modernism examines the anglophone literatures of the archipelago from 1890 to 1970 for what they tell us about changing identities, geographies, and ecologies.
