Scottish literature and Anglo-American modernity: what makes it new?

Riach, A. (2014) Scottish literature and Anglo-American modernity: what makes it new? In: Irimia, M. and Paris, A. (eds.) Literature and the Long Modernity. Series: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemein und Vergleichden Literaturwissenschaft (176). Rodopi: Amsterdam-New York, pp. 293-307. ISBN 9789042038523

Abstract

This essay begins by considering the priorities of aesthetics and politics in early twentieth-century Scotland and Ireland, contrasting the aesthetics of modernism (multiple perspectives) against the imperatives of politics (singleness of purpose). Irish and Anglo-American modernist writing in English arises from the artist individuated yet reified into a position of detachment and deliberately fragments erstwhile traditional structures. Scottish modernist writing reclaims traditional forms and explicitly self-politicises. Four moments of entering modernity in the Scottish literary tradition, in the 16th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, lead to the independence referendum of 2014, ‘making it new’ in an unpredicted context.

• Item Type: Book Sections (Other)
• Keywords: Keywords: W.B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ireland, Scotland, Modernism, Romanticism, American Modernism, Edwin Muir, Asthetics of Perception, Aesthetics of Participation, Politics in Literature, Edward Dorn, Modernisation, Scottish Literary History, Modernity, Anglo-American
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Riach, Professor Alan
• Authors: Riach, A.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PE English; P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General); P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History; P Language and Literature > PS American literature
• College/School: College of Arts > School of Critical Studies > Scottish Literature
• Publisher: Rodopi
• ISBN: 9789042038523