Community in Modern Scottish 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.

‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel.

While ‘community’ as a concept has come under increasing attack in a neoliberal era, it has remained in Scotland a mythic, though not unexamined, signifier of resistance to perceived threats to national identity. Community, central to the Scottish novel since the Kailyard, continues to be a prevalent theme in the many important novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored here. Yet, while often disturbingly oppressive in tenor, many of these representations of community actually attack the myth of Scottish communalism to critique, and often expose as forms of madness, the conventional values of social class, capitalism, patriarchy, and religion.

The New Scots: Migration and Diaspora in Scottish Poetry.

This chapter examines the poetry of Scottish South Asians, the "New Scots" who bring a whole history of displacement, dislocation and relocation with them, as their memory of the "elsewhere" enters their writing. Their voices are significant as they embody multicultural Scotland with postcolonial dialects that signify an encounter in the Third Space where they are affected by and affect the "host" community. This chapter will question whether the writing of "New Scots" has added more than just "colour" to Scottish Poetry, as it traces the recent migrant history and analyses the lives and "voices" of diasporic communities as evident in their poetry. The objective is to assess how the new "voices" have blended in, expanded and/or challenged the boundaries of what defines Scottish Poetry, and determine whether they form a "community" of poets distinguished by the complexity of their regional allegiances, both past and present.

In search of community.

Community derives from the Latin root word communis (common), which itself breaks down into two possible derivations [...]. The first, com plus munis (what is indebted, bound, or obligated together), is thought to be more philologically accurate, while the second, com plus unus (what is together as one), carries the status of a folk- etymology.

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Impossible Community.

This chapter suggests two main related points. The overarching contention is that Hugh MacDiarmid was a poetic, political, polemical, and metaphysical impossibilist (rather than merely the extremist of caricature). More particularly, in an attempt to escape the impossible community of the Kailyard – provincial, retrogressive, Christian, Scotland-as-Brigadoon – MacDiarmid fashioned an equally impossible if conflicting community, profoundly singular yet ultimately spiritual, that nonetheless contained residual Kailyard archetypes. The argument is traced through examination of MacDiarmid’s attitude to the Kailyard; work relating to the small communities in which he lived and wrote, and to cities; and the question of his anti-Englishness.