Kailyard and Scottish Literature (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature)

For more than a century, the word 'Kailyard' has been a focal point of Scottish literary and cultural debate. Originally a term of literary criticism, it has come to be used, often pejoratively, across a whole range of academic and popular discourse. Historians, politicians and critics of Scottish film and media have joined literary scholars in using the term to set out a diagnosis of Scottish culture. This is the first comprehensive study of the subject. Andrew Nash traces the origins of the Kailyard diagnosis in the nineteenth century and considers the critical concerns that gave rise to it.

Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature

Other Renaissances is a collection of twelve essays discussing renaissances beyond the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian and then pan-European Renaissance. With a prologue by Giuseppe Mazzotta about the Italian Renaissance as a "world-making" epistemology, and an afterward by Sander Gilman to summarize the cogent points of the essays, the collection proposes an approach to reframing the Renaissance in which the European Renaissance becomes an imaginative idea, rather than a particular moment in time. Essays cover the Chinese, Harlem, Bengali, Tamil, Maori, Irish, Mexican, Arab, Hebrew, and Cold War Renaissance of the US in the 1950s.

Derrida, Literature and War: Absence and the Chance of Meeting

This is a fascinating examination of the relation between absence and chance in Derrida's work and through that a re-examination of the relation between war and literature. "Derrida, Literature and War" argues for the importance of the relation between absence and chance in Derrida's work in thinking today about war and literature. Sean Gaston starts by marking Derrida's attempts to resist the philosophical tradition of calculating on absence as an assured resource, while insisting on the (mis)chances of the chance encounter. Gaston re-examines the relation between the concept of war and the chances of literature by focusing on narratives of conflict set during the Napoleonic wars.

Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-- 1992

Examining the development of avant garde theatre from its inception in the 1890s right up to the present day, Christopher Innes exposes a central paradox of modern theatre; that the motivating force of theatrical experimentation is primitivism. What links the work of Strindberg, Artaud, Brook and Mnouchkine is an idealisation of the elemental and a desire to find ritual in archaic traditions. This widespread primitivism is the key to understanding both the political and aesthetic aspects of modern theatre and provides fresh insights into contemporary social trends.

Fiction and Diction

One of the founders of structuralist literary theory, Gerard Genette here addresses the question of "literariness" -- of what it  is that makes a text an aesthetic object. Published in French in 1991, Fiction and Diction explores the conditions under which a written or spoken text is perceived as "literature". With reference to writers and theorists from Aristotle to Moliere to Iris Murdoch, Genette investigates the different facets -- particularly "regimes", "criteria" and "modes" -- of literariness.