Community in Modern Scottish Literature is the first book to examine representations and theories of community in Scottish writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across a broad range of authors and from various conceptual perspectives. The leading scholars in the field examine work in the novel, poetry, and drama, by key Scottish authors such as MacDiarmid, Kelman, and Galloway, as well as less well known writers. This includes postmodern and postcolonial readings, analysis of writing by gay and Gaelic authors, alongside theorists of community such as Nancy, Bauman, Delanty, Cohen, Blanchot, and Anderson. This book will unsettle and yet broaden traditional conceptions of community in Scotland and Scottish literature, suggesting a more plural idea of what community might be.
Scott Lyall is Lecturer in Modern Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. He is author of Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (EUP, 2006), and has edited books on MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
"[...] a smart and often fascinating step into a much-needed area of enquiry. Unsurprisingly for a collection including some of the most interesting and recognised writers on modern Scottish literature, it stands as a useful literary history on its own, and contains some valuable and highly original accounts of familiar and unfamiliar texts. Like the other SCROLL collections, it is beautifully presented and organised and will hopefully be attractive to libraries in Scotland and elsewhere, and should find a place on many undergraduate reading lists. The book is welcome and important, and we should try to ensure it is widely read."
- Michael Gardiner, University of Warwick, in Scottish Literary Review, Vol.9.2 (2017)
"[…] as this book points out, community perhaps really becomes most interesting when examined at the microlevel, when examined through the lens of particular writers, texts and contexts. Lyall lets the chapters speak for themselves and perhaps this is fair enough."
- Eleanor Bell, Brock University in Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, Vol. 4 No. 1 pp. 132-142