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Palgrave Macmillan

Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography

The Masks of the Modern Nation

  • Book
  • © 2005

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. The World of Things Undone

  2. Conclusion: The Magnetic North

Keywords

About this book

This fascinating new study is about cultural change and continuities. At the core of the book are discrete literary studies of Scotland and Shakespeare, Walter Scott, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the modern Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and more recent cultural and literary phenomena. The central theme of literature and popular 'representation' recontextualises literary analysis in a broader, multi-faceted picture involving all the arts and the changing sense of what 'the popular' might be in a modern nation. New technologies alter forms of cultural production and the book charts a way through these forms, from oral poetry and song to the novel, and includes studies of paintings, classical music, socialist drama, TV, film and comic books. The international context for mass media cultural production is examined as the story of the intrinsic curiosity of the imagination and the intensely local aspect of Scotland's cultural self-representation unfolds.

Reviews

'This is a remarkable book in its diversity of subjects... but its strength is the provocation of thought in new directions.' - Glasgow Sunday Herald

'...as an overview of a wide period, tied together historically and conecptually, it thoroughly justified its wide ambition and should be vital to anyone in Scot Lit.' - Michael Gardiner, Scottish Studies Review

'...a thought-provoking discussion of a central issue in post-Union cultural history, that of the conflicting, stereotyped or idealised representation(s) of Scotland's stateless nationhood...The first book-length inquiry on this subject and the most challenging, so far, in terms of both the variety and the number of 'texts' analysed - mainly literary, but also filmic, musical and visual...' - Carla Sassi, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies

About the author

ALAN RIACH is a poet and Head of the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Formerly Associate Professor of English and Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato (New Zealand), he is the General Editor of the Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid and co-editor of MacDiarmid's New Selected Letters and Selected Poems). He has four books of poems, including Clearances, First & Last Songs, and This Folding Map. He has also broadcast on radio in New Zealand, and lives in Scotland.

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