1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910811856003321

Autore

Miller Gavin

Titolo

Alasdair Gray : The Fiction of Communion / / Gavin Miller

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Leiden; ; Boston : , : BRILL, , 2005

ISBN

94-012-0189-7

1-4237-9106-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (145 p.)

Collana

SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature ; ; 4

Disciplina

823/.914

Soggetti

Communities in literature

Literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter One: Lanark, The White Goddess , and "spiritual communion" -- Chapter Two: The divided self - Alasdair Gray and R.D. Laing -- Chapter Three: Reading and time -- Conclusion: How "post-" is Gray? -- Bibliography, Index.

Sommario/riassunto

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.