This collection traces 100 years of Gaelic verse and includes both "high" and "low" poetry, children's verse and nonsense rhymes, as well as the serious, intellectual verse of the 1940s and 1950s. Each poem has a facing English translation, and the introduction sets the poems into their cultural and literary context. Poets include Domhnall Ruadh Choruna, Sorley Maclean and George Campbell Hay.
This book fulfils a keenly-felt need for a modern, comprehensive dictionary of Scottish Gaelic into English. The numerous examples of usage and idiom in this work have been modelled on examples culled from modern literature, and encompass many registers ranging from modern colloquial speech, to more elaborate literary constructions. The main contemporary terms and idiomatic phraseology, often not available in other dictionaries, provide excellent models for easier language learning. In addition to the main dictionary, the volume contains introductory material, providing guidance on using the dictionary, spelling and pronunciation. There are also twelve useful appendices which cover not only the various parts of speech, lenition and proper nouns, but also address the more difficult issues of expressing time, direction and numerals. The clarity of the design and layout of the volume will greatly ease the process of attaining mastery of the Gaelic language.
Detractors have long described Scottish Gaelic as a dying language, yet there has never been as much interest shown in it as today. In print, on radio and television, Gaelic, with its vast vocabulary, has been shown to be more than adequate to express, not only the requirements of the old life of the Highlands and Islands, but also to act as a modern language for a modern world. This book will be found to be valuable manual for speakers, teachers. learners and writers of Scottish .Gaelic
What did war look like in the cultural imagination of 1914? Why did men in Scotland sign up to fight in unprecedented numbers? What were the martial myths shaping Scottish identity from the aftermath of Bannockburn to the close of the nineteenth century, and what did the Scottish soldiers of the First World War think they were fighting for? Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Bannockburn is a collection of new interdisciplinary essays interrogating the trans-historical myths of nation, belonging and martial identity that shaped Scotland’s encounter with the First World War. In a series of thematically linked essays, experts from the fields of literature, history and cultural studies examine how Scotland remembers war, and how remembering war has shaped Scotland.
This volume considers the major themes, texts and authors of Scottish literature of the twentieth and, so far, twenty-first century. It identifies the contexts and impulses that led Scottish writers to adopt their creative literary strategies. Moving beyond traditional classifications, it draws on the most recent critical approaches to open up new perspectives on Scottish literature since 1900. The volume's innovative thematic structure ensures that the most important texts or authors are seen from different perspectives whether in the context of empire, renaissance, war and post-war, literary genre, generation, and resistance. In order to provide thorough coverage, these thematic chapters are complemented by chronological 'Arcade' chapters, which outline the contexts of the literature of the period by decades, and by 'Overview' chapters which trace developments across the century in theatre, language and Gaelic literature. Taken together, the chapters provide a thorough and thought-provoking account of the century's literature.
Community in Modern Scottish Literature is the first book to examine representations and theories of community in Scottish writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across a broad range of authors and from various conceptual perspectives. The leading scholars in the field examine work in the novel, poetry, and drama, by key Scottish authors such as MacDiarmid, Kelman, and Galloway, as well as less well known writers. This includes postmodern and postcolonial readings, analysis of writing by gay and Gaelic authors, alongside theorists of community such as Nancy, Bauman, Delanty, Cohen, Blanchot, and Anderson. This book will unsettle and yet broaden traditional conceptions of community in Scotland and Scottish literature, suggesting a more plural idea of what community might be.
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers.