Scotland’s Forgotten Treasure is a detailed study of the aesthetics and the religious vision of the fantasy works written by nineteenth-century Scottish novelist, George MacDonald. MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) are the origin of much modern fantasy writing, and Colin Manlove brings to bear on MacDonald’s major achievements decades of study in fantasy literature to unlock the structures that govern MacDonald’s imagination and the relevance of his works to contemporary religious and scientific thought.
Manlove reveals in MacDonald’s works a depth and complexity that establishes them as among the the most original works of nineteenth-century literature, and a treasure that should be the centrepiece of any account of nineteenth-century Scottish fiction.
Book Details
Conversations with Scottish Poets presents fourteen interviews conducted by Italian literary critic and translator Marco Fazzini since the 1980s. By asking the same or similar questions of Scottish poets of different generations, the interviews provide insight both into the ideas and working methods of the individual poets and also into the ways in which the poets’ relationship with their country and its languages have changed between the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.
The poets interviewed are Norman MacCaig, Sorley Maclean, Edwin Morgan, Derick Thomson, Iain Crichton Smith, Alasdair Gray, Kenneth White, Douglas Dunn, Valerie Gillies, Christopher Whyte, John Burnside, David Kinloch, Robert Crawford and Don Paterson. The. interviews are illustrated with portraits of the poets by Itlian artists Franco Dugo, Paolo Annibali, Nicola Nannini and Doriano Scazzosi.
Book Details
Herbert Grierson was only 28 when he was appointed Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen in 1895; in the following quarter of a century he established himself as the most distinguished literary critic of his time: first, by the publication in 1912 of his edition of the poetry of the then little acknowledged seventeenth-century English poet John Donne, and subsequently by his influential anthology of The Metaphysical Poets, published in 1919. Because of Grierson, Donne became the most admired poet of some of the twentieth-century’s most influential poets, and the ‘Metaphysicals’ became the model for many of the most radical developments in twentieth-century poetry.
Book Details
This is the first monograph wholly devoted to the poetry of Medbh McGuckian and it presents pathways into her work that have thus far remained largely unexplored. The chapters examine the ways in which McGuckian uses literary exemplars to explore the psychodramas of female literary authorship and ways of approaching issues of memory, trauma and elegiac remembrance.
This monograph provides an excellent introduction to McGuckian’s poetry and argues that her work self-reflexively presents a deeply felt belief in the primacy (and efficacy) of poetry in the modern world.
Book Details