Alasdair Gray's writing, and in particular his great novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), is often read as a paradigm of postmodern practice. This study challenges that view by presenting an analysis that is at once more conventional and more strongly radical. By reading Gray in his cultural and intellectual context, and by placing him within the tradition of a Scottish history of ideas that has been largely neglected in contemporary critical writing, Gavin Miller re-opens contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity. Scottish social anthropology and psychiatry (including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing) can be seen as formative influences on Gray's anti-essentialist vision of Scotland as a mosaic of communities, and of our social need for recognition, acknowledgement and the common life.
- ISBN10 9042017570
- ISBN13 9789042017573
- Publish Date 1 January 2005
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country NL
- Publisher Brill
- Imprint Editions Rodopi B.V.
- Format Paperback
- Pages 144
- Language English
- URL brill.com/product_id83309