Doing and Teaching

Discusses the decision at the University of Stirling, Scotland, in the late 1960s, to appoint a Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, to the permanent faculty, and to include creative writing options within the English studies degree program. Assesses subsequent developments and argues for the value of such integration for all literature undergraduates

'Ginger beer and earthquakes' –Stevenson and the terrors of contingency

The essay traces recurrent tropes of contingency, and even absurdity, in Stevenson's writing to argue for an existential or proto-existential element in his thought. It touches on the critical case made for aspects of modernism in his writing and it refers in particular to his essays 'Aes Triplex' and 'Pulvis et Umbra'

Echoes and Shadows: Creative Interferences from World War II

Academic and poet Roderick Watson reflects on memories of war and the popular culture of war that influenced his younger years only to reappear in the imagery of his later creative work. A critical reflection is offered on popular representations of the Second World War, and how these have become a foundational myth of modern British identity. Attention is paid to his first major collection True History on the Walls (1976) and the poems that make explicit reference to the conflict of 1939-45

The Modern Scottish Literary Renaissance

This chapter discusses the cultural politics of identity in the early twentieth century Scottish literary renaissance. It looks at the paradoxes contained in what might seem like an essentialist argument for 'Scottish' difference at political, cultural and psychological levels, while the literary work produced by its leading exponents actually problematises the very concept of a stable identity in the first place

Living with the Double Tongue: Modern Poetry in Scots

The linguistic pluralism inherent in Scottish cultural identity has made contemporary writers in Scotland peculiarly sensitive to how subjectivity is simultaneously constructed and undone in the precisions and imprecisions of language and in the tangled translations and transitions (and the political and social complexities) between utterance and reception. Such factors are doubly relevant to the unique status of Scots as a literary language, both demotic and constructed, both familiar and estranged, that is both 'other' to, and 'othered' by English. In this respect the 'double tongue' of poetry in Scots has a telling relationship with the instabilities of expression and identity as realised by contemporary writers, who are more concerned with the problematics of personal, existential, political or sexual being than they are with an older generation's interest in recovering a national identity and establishing validating links to an older literary tradition

"The unrest and movement of our century": the universe of The Wrecker

Stevenson's novel The Wrecker is a prophetically postmodern vision of a depthless world of travel, exile, novelty and rootlessness, of 'discarded sons' whose corruption, in a world they neither understand nor fully belong to, is curiously innocent