19 research outputs found
Edinburgh Monuments, the Literary Canon, and Cultural Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective
Building on comparative studies of the memory landscapes of cities and monuments, describes three different monument series in Edinburgh, the Canongate Wall at the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood, the flagstone quotations in Makar\u27s Court near the Writers\u27 Museum, and the grouped herms in the Edinburgh Business Park; discusses how the authors included in each series were selected and how each relates to the formal and informal Scottish literary canon; and briefly indicates what comparative scholarship suggests about the relation of such monuments to the development of cultural nationalism
Literature and music: introduction
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Hitler on the Ballachulish Beat: The Plays of C. P. Taylor
Although seven of his plays were performed at the 1992 Edinburgh
International Festival, the Scottish playwright C.P. Taylor (1929-81) is
much less well-known than some of this younger colleagues. This is
particularly unfortunate as C.P. Taylorâs thematic concerns, and the dramatic
vocabulary he employs to voice them, are unique in their contemporary
Scottish context, albeit strongly indebted to European, specifically
German, Modernism.
The article will first provide a brief survey of C.P. Taylorâs life and
writing career, focussing on his Jewish background (which informs,
for example, such plays as Walter and The Black and White Minstrels),
and on the conditions of writing in exile (as a Scot in England). The
second part will consist of a detailed, comparative examination of three
plays, namely, Bread and Butter, The Ballachulish Beat, and Good. In
spite of their considerable differences âBread and Butter explores the
lives of two young Jewish couples in Glasgow, The Ballachullish Beat
follows the career of a rock band, and Good discusses the question of
euthanasia before the sinister background of 1930s Germany âall three
plays are concerned with the responses of individuals to the pressures,
but also the allure, of various kinds of totalitarianism. In addition, all
three plays associate totalitarianism with music, as a pre- or non- rational
form of experience; as a consequence, the role of music in these
plays, both as a theme and as a dramatic technique, will have to be
explored
James Robertson, The Fanatic (2000)
Suggests that Robertson\u27s first novel, chiefly concerned with 17th century Scotland, already shows the complex intertextual relationships with earlier Scottish works by Scott, Hogg, and Stevenson that marks his subsequent writing, and comments particularly on its question What happens later?, in relation to the Scottish vote for political devolution in May 1997
âPolarities within an Entityâ: The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankinâs The Falls (2001)
The cultural profile of the literary haut lieu that is Edinburgh is marked by a strong interest in the violent history of the city, specifically, in its legacy of crime. This legacy is preserved in a variety of material and immaterial archives, including a substantial body of fictional and non-fictional literature, and inscribed in the Edinburgh cityscape. It is also commodified so as to attract the international tourist trade. Using as its prime example Ian Rankinâs 2001 Rebus novel The Falls, this paper sketches the cultural history of one notorious criminal case, that of William Burke and William Hare. In particular, it discusses the spatio-temporal referentiality of texts about Burke and Hare and situates them in the wider context of the Scottish literary tradition
A Dead Poets' Society : Rupert Brooke's and August Stramm's War Poems
Among the millions of casualties of World War I, there were hundreds of poets, some of them quite well known when they enlisted, while others only found â and tragically lost â their literary voices during the war. It is the latter group of poets who are often regarded as âWar Poetsâ proper â War Poets, moreover, whose poems appear to express distinctly anti-war attitudes. Two of the most famous literary casualties of 1915 were Rupert Brooke and August Stramm. This article will discuss some of their war poems and will use these poems to illustrate the enormous formal and thematic range war poetry can, and does, cover. In the process, it will also suggest that recent comparative approaches to British and French World War I poetry, and to the presence or otherwise of an identifiable group of War Poets in national literatures, should be extended so as to include German examples.publishe