Download or read book Bella Caledonia written by Kirsten Stirling and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text looks at the widespread tradition of using a female figure to represent the nation, focusing on twentieth-century Scottish literature. The woman-as-nation figure emerged in Scotland in the twentieth century, but as a literary figure rather than an institutional icon like Britannia or France’s Marianne. Scottish writers make use of familiar aspects of the trope such as the protective mother nation and the woman as fertile land, which are obviously problematic from a feminist perspective. But darker implications, buried in the long history of the figure, rise to the surface in Scotland, such as woman/nation as victim, and woman/nation as deformed or monstrous. As a result of Scotland’s unusual status as a nation within the larger entity of Great Britain, the literary figures under consideration here are never simply incarnations of a confident and complete nation nurturing her warrior sons. Rather, they reflect a more modern anxiety about the concept of the nation, and embody a troubled and divided national identity. Kirsten Stirling traces the development of the twentieth-century Scotland-as-woman figure through readings of poetry and fiction by male and female writers including Hugh MacDiarmid, Naomi Mitchison, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Willa Muir, Alasdair Gray, A.L. Kennedy, Ellen Galford and Janice Galloway.
Download or read book Bella Caledonia written by Mike Small and published by Leamington Books. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 2007, writers Mike Small and Kevin Williamson launched Bella Caledonia at the Radical Book Fair in Edinburgh. Since then, Bella has consistently explored ideas of self-determination and offered Scotland's most robust and insightful political commentary. In the run up to Scottish independence referendum, international interest grew and Bella Caledonia had more than 500,000 unique users a month, with a peak of one million in August ― and since then has been given multiple awards recognising it as one of the top 10 political blogs in the UK. This anthology, curated by Mike Small, is a flavour of Bella's output over these 14 years ― the editor's pick. Bella is aligned to no political party and sees herself as the bastard child of parent publications too good for this world; from Calgacus to Red Herring, from Harpies & Quines to the Black Dwarf. Under Mike's editorship, Bella has developed a 'Fifth Estate' as a way of disrupting the passive relationship of old media, creating something more active and appropriate for the 21st century ― it's about concentration of ownership, and bringing together radical coverage with cultural analysis. Hence the plethora of wide-ranging voices in this anthology, each representing outlier viewpoints in contemporary society ― novelists, poets, bloggers and journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and the social media. * "Bella Caledonia has been a flagship for progressive thought in Scotland, providing a platform for informed and creative writing, advocating a progressive and independent nation fit for the future." Stuart Cosgrove "Bella has been to be a constant thorn in the side of the powerful voices who would prefer that conventional wisdom went unchallenged, that awkward questions went unasked, and bold solutions went unheard." Peter Geoehgan * The Contributors: Andy Wightman • Alan Bissett • Brian Quail • George Rosie • Kathleen Jamie • Peter Arnott • Scott Hames • Laura Easton Lewis • Meaghan Delahunt • AL Kennedy • Alistair Davidson • Alastair McIntosh • Katie Gallogly-Swan • Max Macleod • Caitlin Logan • Irvine Welsh • Paul Tritschler • Chloé Farand • Abi Lightbody • Pat Kane • Adam Ramsay • Rory Scothorne • Alison Phipps • Jamie Maxwell • Amna Saleem • Neil Cooper • Dougie Strang • Mairi McFadyen • Christopher Silver • George Gunn • Stuart Christie • George Kerevan • Iain MacKinnon • Dougald Hine • Cait O'Neil McCullagh • Raman Mundair • Gerry Hassan About The Editor: Mike Small is a writer, journalist, author and publisher. He has written for the Guardian, Sunday Herald, Sunday National, Open Democracy, Variant, Lobster and Z Magazine. He is currently working on a biography of Patrick Geddes and a history of Scottish Anarchism. He has edited Bella Caledonia since 2007.
Download or read book Bella Caledonia written by Kirsten Stirling and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text looks at the widespread tradition of using a female figure to represent the nation, focusing on twentieth-century Scottish literature. The woman-as-nation figure emerged in Scotland in the twentieth century, but as a literary figure rather than an institutional icon like Britannia or France's Marianne. Scottish writers make use of familiar aspects of the trope such as the protective mother nation and the woman as fertile land, which are obviously problematic from a feminist perspective. But darker implications, buried in the long history of the figure, rise to the surface in Scotland, such as woman/nation as victim, and woman/nation as deformed or monstrous. As a result of Scotland's unusual status as a nation within the larger entity of Great Britain, the literary figures under consideration here are never simply incarnations of a confident and complete nation nurturing her warrior sons. Rather, they reflect a more modern anxiety about the concept of the nation, and embody a troubled and divided national identity. Kirsten Stirling traces the development of the twentieth-century Scotland-as-woman figure through readings of poetry and fiction by male and female writers including Hugh MacDiarmid, Naomi Mitchison, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Willa Muir, Alasdair Gray, A.L. Kennedy, Ellen Galford and Janice Galloway.
Download or read book Poor Things written by Alasdair Gray and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Alasdair Gray's most brilliant creations, Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter--a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter.Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.
Download or read book The Panopticon written by Jenni Fagan and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists Anais Hendricks, fifteen, is in the back of a police car. She is headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders. She can't remember what’s happened, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and Anais is covered in blood. Raised in foster care from birth and moved through twenty-three placements before she even turned seven, Anais has been let down by just about every adult she has ever met. Now a counterculture outlaw, she knows that she can only rely on herself. And yet despite the parade of horrors visited upon her early life, she greets the world with the witty, fierce insight of a survivor. Anais finds a sense of belonging among the residents of the Panopticon—they form intense bonds, and she soon becomes part of an ad-hoc family. Together, they struggle against the adults that keep them confined. But when she looks up at the watchtower that looms over the residents, Anais realizes her fate: She is an anonymous part of an experiment, and she always was. Now it seems that the experiment is closing in. Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content
Download or read book Bella Caledonia written by Mike Small; Andy Wightman; Alan Bissett; and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Am an Island written by Tamsin Calidas and published by Black Swan Books, Limited. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Memoir of the year' - Vogue 'A wondrous, sensuous memoir of salt-stung survival . . . clear-eyed and poetic prose' Sunday Times 'A fascinating memoir' - Daily Mail When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting, or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of rebirth and renewal. Tamsin begins the slow journey back from the brink. Startling, raw and extremely moving, I Am An Island is a story about the incredible ability of the natural world to provide when everything else has fallen away - a stunning book about solitude, friendship, resilience and self-discovery.
Download or read book Battling Bella written by Leandra Ruth Zarnow and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leandra Ruth Zarnow tells the inspiring and timely story of Bella Abzug, a New York politician who brought the passion and ideals of 1960s protest movements to Congress. Abzug promoted feminism, privacy protections, gay rights, and human rights. Her efforts shifted the political center, until more conservative forces won back the Democratic Party.
Download or read book Scotland After the Virus written by Gerry Hassan and published by Luath Press Ltd. This book was released on 2020-11-16 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The covid pandemic poses huge challenges for Scotland – but also a unique opportunity to rethink who we are as a country, where we are heading, and how to restructure our economy, culture, politics and relationships in addressing the deep disparities the virus has exposed. Bringing together the unique voices of some of our best creative writers, poets and commentators, this book makes a significant contribution to rethinking our future. It explores what 'after the virus' could look like, and how it might be possible. Here are the hopeful voices we need for a time of both uncertainty and exploration.
Download or read book Angus Folk Tales written by Erin Farley and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2021-11-19 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Angus is a landscape of dramatic glens and rich farmland, ancient weaving towns and fishing villages, from the city of Dundee in the lee of the Sidlaw hills in the south, and the Grampian mountains in the north. The tales of Angus are as varied as the landscapes they are tied to, told through the years in castles, bothies, tenements and Travellers' tents. Here, historical legends tell of Caterans roaming the glens, Jacobite intrigue in Glenisla and pirates roving the stormy waters off the Arbroath coast. Kelpies, broonies and fairies lurk just out of sight on riverbanks and hillsides, waiting to draw unsuspecting travellers into another world. The land bears memories of ancient battles, and ghosts continue to walk the old roads in the gloaming. In this collection, storyteller and local historian Erin Farley brings you a wealth of legends and folk tales, both familiar and surprising.
Download or read book God s Teeth and Other Phenomena written by James Kelman and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2020-07-05 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Proctor, a celebrated older writer and curmudgeon, goes off to residency where he is to be an honored part of teaching and giving public readings, he soon finds the atmosphere of the literary world has changed since his last foray into the public sphere. Unknown to most, unable to work on his own writing, surrounded by a host of odd characters, would-be writers, antagonists, handlers, and members of the elite House of Art and Aesthetics, Proctor finds himself driven to distraction (literally in a very very tiny car). This is a story of a man attempting not to go mad when forced to stop his own writing in order to coach others to write. Proctor’s tour of rural places, pubs, theaters, fancy parties, where he is to be headlining as a "Banker-Prize-Winning-Author" reads like a literary version of Spinal Tap. Uproariously funny, brilliantly philosophical, gorgeously written this is James Kelman at his best.
Download or read book Scottish Gothic written by Carol Margaret Davison and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written from various critical standpoints by internationally renowned scholars, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion interrogates the ways in which the concepts of the Gothic and Scotland have intersected and been manipulated from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This interdisciplinary collection is the first ever published study to investigate the multifarious strands of Gothic in Scottish fiction, poetry, theatre and film. Its contributors - all specialists in their fields - combine an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known, produced between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book Contemporary British Fiction written by Nick Bentley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential guide provides a comprehensive survey of the most important debates in the criticism and research of contemporary British fiction. Nick Bentley analyses the criticism surrounding a range of British novelists including Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson. Exploring experiments with literary form, this authoritative book considers cutting-edge concerns relating to the neo-historical novel, the relationship between literature and science, literary geographies, and trauma narratives. Engaging with key literary theories, and identifying present trends and future directions in the literary criticism of contemporary British fiction, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature, teachers, researchers and scholars.
Download or read book Norlan Lichts written by Lesley Benzie and published by Rymour Books. This book was released on 2022-09-03 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of new poems in Scots by three prominent contemporary poets from Aberdeenshire
Download or read book The Doctor Dissected written by Caroline McCracken-Flesher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of bizarre disappearances filled the citizens of early nineteenth-century Scotland with terror. When the perpetrators were finally apprehended in 1828, their motive roiled the nation: William Burke and William Hare had murdered for profit. The cadavers supplied a ready payout, courtesy of Dr. Robert Knox, who was desperate for anatomical subjects. Nearly two hundred years later, these scandalous murders continue to fire imagination in Scotland and beyond. From the start, the sensational events provoked artists and writers. While Sir Walter Scott resisted public comment, his correspondence gives his trenchant private opinion and shows him working busily behind the scenes and against the doctor. Many more mined the news outright. Serial novelist David Pae exploited the disturbance to lobby for religious belief in an increasingly secular world. A subsequent generation resurrected the grisly drama as fodder for the Victorian gothic-the murders figure prominently in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" and, more obliquely, in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The twentieth century saw the specters of Burke and Hare emerge in James Bridie's play The Anatomist, Hollywood horror films, television programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Frankensteinian retellings from Alasdair Gray. In this century, the story has been picked up by Smallville and Doctor Who. Recent allusions and reenactments range from the somber-in popular detective fiction by Ian Rankin-to the dark, camp comedy of Fringe Festival performances and the slapstick of John Landis's Burke and Hare. Featuring over thirty images and canvassing a wide range of media-from contemporary newspaper accounts and private correspondence to Japanese comic books and videogames-The Doctor Dissected analyzes the afterlife of this national trauma and considers its singular place in Scottish history.
Download or read book Shades of Gray written by Dietmar Böhnke and published by Galda & Wilch. This book was released on 2004 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Clapperton written by John Herdman and published by Leamington Books. This book was released on 2020-11-11 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The absurd, the grotesque, Thomas Clapperton, hypochondriac, egomaniac, Scotsman, misanthrope, misogynist, menagerie keeper ... has a date.His romantic rendezvous is with the girl across the road, Trudy Otter. Although Trudy only has an incestuous eye for her brother, Rex.The most dysfunctional of all beings rub against each other in the desperate search for human happiness in John Herdman's gothic miserene, Clapperton.Also in this volume, The Devil and Dr Tuberose. The equally unbalanced Dr Marcus Tuberose battles legless infantry of demons until he finally confronts the devil himself, embodied in the family dog of his blessed colleagues. A tale of transgressive madness from the master of the Scottish Gothic, John Herdman.Two tales of the mania, derangement and the psychopathy peculiar to the Caledonian Antisyzygy. Brace yourself for hilarity, ridicule and an exquisite dose of oddity.ALSO IN THIS EDITION: Complete Herdman Bibliography, spanning six decades of creative output."Perhaps in the very combination of opposites — what either of the two Thomases, of Norwich and Cromarty, might have been willing to call "the Caledonian antisyzygy" — we have a reflection of the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn... we need not be surprised to find that in their literature the Scots present two aspects which appear contradictory. Oxymoron was ever the bravest figure, and we must not forget that disorderly order is order after all." G. GREGORY SMITH, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence"I was struck by Herdman's wry, philosophical bent, his acute sense of place and perception and anguish at the plight of the human condition .... But despite the pitch darkness and seriousness of his themes, Herdman is an appealing writer, with a clipped, laconic and lugubrious wit, capable of swiftly etching a scene .... goodness knows why John Herdman is not much better known than he is." Alan Taylor, The Sunday Herald"Herdman's writing is a feat of great wit and invention." Scotland on Sunday"It is a tribute to Herdman's writing that he evokes so many writers without ever seeming to imitate them .. the quality of Herdman's fantastic imaginings commands respect." Christopher Whyte"John Herdman skilfully treads a vertiginous edge between satiric comedy and high seriousness." The Scotsman
