Examines the representation of landscape in the poetry of John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Robin Robertson and Kenneth White Provides an interdisciplinary approach to the representation of landscape in contemporary poetryOpens up the dialogue between ecocriticism and phenomenologyProvides significant original discussion of major Scottish poetsReassesses the work and place of Kenneth White's poetry and thoughtWith an exciting and provocative approach to the reading of landscape and the non-human world in the work of four major Scottish poets, this groundbreaking book merges phenomenology and ecocritical literary criticism. It explores these poets' organic, intimate interrelation between the self and the world, their relationship to the landscape and connection with nature.

The last three decades have seen unprecedented flourishing of creativity across the Scottish literary landscape, so that contemporary Scottish poetry constitutes an internationally renowned, award-winning body of work. At the heart of this has been the work of poets. As this poetry makes space for its own innovative concerns, it renegotiates the poetic inheritance of preceding generations. At the same time, Scottish poetry continues to be animated by writing from other places. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry is the definitive guide to this flourishing poetic scene. Its chapters examine Scottish poetry in all three of the nation's languages. It analyses many thematic preoccupations: tradition and innovation; revolutions in gender; the importance of place; the aesthetic politics of devolution. These chapters are complemented by extended close readings of the work of key poets that have defined this era, including Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, Aonghas MacNeacail and John Burnside.

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature examines the ways in which the cultural and political role of Scottish writing has changed since the country's successful referendum on national self-rule in 1997. In doing so, it makes a convincing case for a distinctive post-devolution Scottish criticism. Introducing over forty original essays under four main headings - 'Contexts', 'Genres', 'Authors' and 'Topics' - the volume covers the entire spectrum of current interests and topical concerns in the field of Scottish studies and heralds a new era in Scottish writing, literary criticism and cultural theory. It records and critically outlines prominent literary trends and developments, the specific political circumstances and aesthetic agendas that propel them, as well as literature's capacity for envisioning new and alternative futures. Issues under discussion include class, sexuality and gender, nationhood and globalisation, the New Europe and cosmopolitan citizenship, postcoloniality,

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.

This book presents a provocative and timely reconsideration of modern Scottish literature in the light of ecological thought. Louisa Gairn demonstrates how successive generations of Scottish writers have both reflected on and contributed to the development of international ecological theory and philosophy. Provocative re-readings of works by authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, Nan Shepherd, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and George Mackay Brown demonstrate the significance of ecological thought across the spectrum of Scottish literary culture. This book traces the influence of ecology as a scientific, philosophical and political concept in the work of these and other writers and in doing so presents an original outlook on Scottish literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.

This book demonstrates the legacies of Romanticism which animate the poetry and poetics of Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, John Burnside, and Kathleen Jamie. It argues that the English Romantic tradition serves as a source of inspiration and critical contention for these Irish, Welsh, and Scottish poets, and it relates this engagement to wider concerns with gender, nation, and nature which have shaped contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Covering a substantial number of works from the 1980s to the 2010s, the book discusses how Boland and Clarke, as women poets from the Republic of Ireland and Wales, react to a male-dominated and Anglocentric lyric tradition and thus rework notions of the Romantic. It examines how Burnside and Jamie challenge, adopt, and revise Romantic aesthetics of nature and environment. The book is the first in-depth study to read Boland, Clarke, Burnside, and Jamie as post-Romantics. By disentangling the aesthetic and critical conceptions of Romanticism which inform their inheritance, it develops an innovative approach to the understanding of contemporary poetry and literary influence.

This innovative collection of essays is focused on the idea of transmedialization: the ways that the traditional forms of the predominantly oral cultures of Scotland and Brittany (poetry, song and story) can be transformed by the use of hybrid forms and new digital technologies. The volume invites readers from a range of disciplines – music, art, literature, history, cultural memory studies, anthropology or media studies – to consider how an intermedial aesthetics of the edge can enable these distinctive cultures to thrive. The languages of both cultures are presently endangered and the essays seek to connect notions of language with a culture which can align its traditions with the concerns of the present day. The collection proceeds from a conceptual analysis of poetry film, peripheral vision and the concerns of peripheral communities to an examination of inventive practices in the film-poem, experimental video, film portrait, word-image, digitised music, sound-image and genre-contestant narratives. The collection also includes contributions from creative practitioners who utilize a range of hybrid forms to revitalize the traditional vernacular cultures of Scotland and Brittany. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, film studies, media studies, music, cultural theory, and philosophy.

A wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds.

Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms explores the ways Irish and Scottish literatures have influenced each other from the 1760s onwards. Although an early form of Celticism disappeared with the demise of the Celtic Revivals of Ireland and Scotland, the 'Celtic world' and the 'Celtic temperament' remained key themes in central texts of Irish and Scottish literature well into the twentieth century. Richard Barlow examines the emergence, development, and transformation of Celticism within Irish and Scottish writing and identifies key connections between modern Irish and Scottish authors and texts. By reading works from figures such as James Macpherson, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, Fiona Macleod, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, and Seamus Heaney in their political and cultural contexts, Barlow provides a new account of the characteristics and phases of literary Celticism within Romanticism, Modernism, and beyond.