Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art

Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art
Author: Camille Manfredi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2019-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030187608

This book examines how contemporary Scottish writers and artists revisit and reclaim nature in the political and aesthetic context of devolved Scotland. Camille Manfredi investigates the interaction of landscape aesthetics and strategies of spatial representation in Scotland’s twenty-first-century literature and arts, focusing on the apparatuses designed by nature writers, poets, performers, walking artists and visual artists to physically and intellectually engage with the land and re-present it to themselves and to the world. Through a comprehensive analysis of a variety of site-specific artistic practices, artworks and publications, this book investigates the works of Scotland-based artists including Linda Cracknell, Kathleen Jamie, Thomas A. Clark, Gerry Loose, John Burnside, Alec Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Hanna Tuulikki and Roseanne Watt, with a view to exploring the ongoing re-invention of a territory-bound identity that dwells on an inclusive sense of place, as well as on a complex renegotiation with the time and space of Scotland.

Intermedial Art Practices as Cultural Resilience

Intermedial Art Practices as Cultural Resilience
Author: Lindsay Blair
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2024-09-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040115101

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.

The New Nature Writing

The New Nature Writing
Author: Jos Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2017-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147427501X

"In the last decade, the proliferation and popularity of landscape writing in Britain and Ireland -- often referred to as "the new nature writing' -- has unearthed an intricate labyrinth of horizons to contemporary writing about place. The New Nature Writing: Rethinking Place in Contemporary Literature offers the first critical study of the genre. Drawing on original interviews with authors, archival research, and the latest scholarly work in the fields of literary geographies, critical localism and archipelagic criticism, the book covers the work of such writers as Robert MacFarlane, Richard Mabey and Alice Oswald. Examining the ways in which these writers have engaged with a wide range of different environments, from the edgelands to island spaces, Jos Smith reveals how they recreate a resourceful and dynamic sense of localism in rebellion against the homogenising growth of 'clone town Britain.'"--

British Art and the Environment

British Art and the Environment
Author: Charlotte Gould
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2021-07-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000408213

This book explores the nature of Britain-based artists’ engagement with the transformations of their environment since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. At a time of pressing ecological concerns, the international group of contributors provide a series of case studies that reconsider the nature–culture divide and aim at identifying the contours of a national narrative that stretches from enclosed lands to rising seas. By adopting a longer historical view, this book hopes to enrich current debates concerning art’s engagement with recording and questioning the impact of human activity on the environment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, environmental humanities, and British studies.

New Forms of Environmental Writing

New Forms of Environmental Writing
Author: Timothy C. Baker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2022-05-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350271330

Surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book explores our most pressing environmental concerns and shows how these texts find innovative new ways to respond to our environmental crisis. Arguing for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature, as well as themes of attention, care, and loss, Baker highlights the ways that fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. These texts provide new ways to consider the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world. The author proposes a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment and draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism and posthumanism. Examining works by writers including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil and Kathleen Jamie, Baker provides important new insights into understanding our planetary predicament.

Nuclear Fictions

Nuclear Fictions
Author: Michael Gardiner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2024-11-30
Genre:
ISBN: 1474475752

In this book, Michael Gardiner suggests that the conception of the ‘war-ending’ weapon was tied up with a longer commitment to unified space and singular progress. The mission for total weapons can be seen rising with the highly-technical defensive war of the later nineteenth century, and passing through twentieth century atomic research, then the targeting of the outsides of commercial empire, and the post-war consensus with deterrence as its foundation. The end of the Cold War brought an opportunity to fully naturalise deterrence, but also brought a tacit acceptance of nuclear violence while forms of violence against the individual were rigorously sought out. If the world-unifying role of deterrence has always been undermined by the rise of rival empires, it has also been questioned by critical communities including the consensus-sceptics of the 1950s–60s, 1980s–90s Nuclear Criticism and readers of ‘nuclear ism’, millennial campaigns for Scottish independence, and twenty-first century descriptions of nuclear colonialism. Recently it has become more obvious that an Anglosphere concept of ‘worldly’ deterrence was bound to a singular and ultimately nihilistic idea of progress.[bio]Michael Gardiner is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick.

Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis

Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis
Author: Amatoritsero Ede
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000998479

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

Antlers of Water

Antlers of Water
Author: Kathleen Jamie
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1786899809

'Luminous' The Times 'Beautiful’ Caught by the River Bringing together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens, through prose, poetry and photography. Edited and introduced by Kathleen Jamie, and with contributions from Amy Liptrot, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Malachy Tallack, Amanda Thomson and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.

The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature

The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature
Author: Monika Szuba
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030126455

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.

Contemporary Scottish Literature

Contemporary Scottish Literature
Author: Matt McGuire
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2008-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350308773

This Guide examines the critical construction of the genre of 'contemporary Scottish literature' and assesses the critical responses to a wide range of contemporary Scottish fiction, poetry and drama. The Guide is structured thematically with each chapter addressing a specific area of debate within the field of contemporary Scottish Studies.