Alasdair Gray is one of the most innovative and imaginative writers to have appeared on the Scottish literary scene for many years. Gray radically challenges the vision of Glasgow and Scotland as defined by the traditional Glasgow novel. This study first looks back into the past of Glasgow writing to locate some specific novelistic models which Gray echoes in his fiction. The main part of the study then illustrates that Gray's literary attitude of looking beyond Glasgow (or Scotland) is much more helpful in «imagining Glasgow» than to follow the established and trodden paths of Scottish urban writing. In this sense, Gray proves that the narrative techniques characteristic of postmodernist writing are not only helpful in expressing the often quoted Scottish experience of fragmentation, but also in overcoming the artistic stalemate of the Glasgow novel.

"Since the publication of Lanark in 1981 Alasdair Gray has been a figure of importance in contemporary literature. Now, through attention to mixed genre, counter-historical narrative, and the thematics of memory, this first study of Alasdair Gray's novels shows the coherence of the Scottish writer's varied body of work. Stephen Bernstein refuses to view Gray's work through the vague lens of postmodernism, seeing Gray instead as a writer at home in a variety of literary traditions. Beginning by providing an American audience with backgrounds to Gray's work, this study recounts the chronology of his publications and their reception by an international audience, simultaneously placing his writing in the contexts of Scottish culture and literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Postmodern Chronotope is an innovative interdisciplinary study of the contemporary. It will be of special interest to anyone interested in relations between postmodernism, geography and contemporary fiction. Some claim that postmodernism questions history and historical bases to culture; some say it is about loss of affect, loss of depth models, and superficiality; others claim it follows from the conditions of post-industrial society; and others cite commodification of place, Disneyfication, simulation and post-tourist spectacle as evidence that postmodernism is wedded to late capitalism. Whatever postmodernism is, or turns out to have been, it is bound up in rethinking and reworking space and time, and Paul Smethurst's intervention here is to introduce the postmodern chronotope as a term through which these spatial and temporal shifts might be apprehended. The postmodern chronotope constitutes a postmodern world-view and postmodern way of seeing. In a sense it is the natural successor to a modernist way of seeing defined through cubism, montage and relativity. The book is arranged as follows: - Part 1 is an interdisciplinary study casting a wide net across a range of cultural, social and scientific activity, from chaos theory to cinema, from architecture to performance art, from IT to tourism. - Part 2 offers original readings of a selection of postmodern novels, including Graham Swift's Waterland and Out of this World, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and First Light, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Marina Warner's Indigo, Caryl Phillips' Cambridge, and Don DeLillo's The Names and Ratner's Star.

This is the first bibliography of Postmodernism to take account of work published in all subject areas and in all languages. Deborah Madsen has identified a new first occurrence of the term in 1926, preceding by more than twenty years the first occurence documented by the Oxford English Dictionary. In a chronological listing, books, articles, notes, letters and working papers on Postmodernism are described with full bibliographical details. Reviews of major books are documented and full contents listings are given for special issues of journals devoted to Postmodernism. An appendix includes books on Postmodernism announced for publication in 1995. This bibliography brings together in one place all secondary material published on Postmodernism. All disciplines are included, from anthropology to zoology: architecture, cultural studies, dance, drama, feminism, fiction, geography, history, legal studies, literary theory, mathematics, medicine, music, pedagogical theory, philosophy, photography and film, poetry, politics, religion, sociology, the visual and plastic arts, and others. The bibliography also documents items in a range of languages other than English: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Slovanian, Spanish, and the Scandinavian languages. Access to the information contained in the bibliography is made easy with a comprehensive index providing guidance according to author, subject, language, and key words. Postmodernism: A Bibliography, 1926-1994 is an essential reference text for anyone working in the area of contemporary culture studies.

The essays in this volume are informed by a variety of theoretical assumptions and of critical methodologies, but they all share an interest in the intersections of word and image in a variety of media. This unifying rationale secures the present collection's central position in the current critical context, defined as it predominantly is by ways of reading that are based on a relational nexus. The intertextual, the intermedial, the intersemiotic are indeed foregrounded and combined in these essays, conceptually as much as in the critical practices favoured by the various contributions. Studies of literature in its relation to pictorial genres enjoy a relative prominence in the volume - but the range of media and of approaches considered is broad enough to include photography, film, video, television, comic strips, animated film, public art, material culture. The backgrounds of contributors are likewise diverse - culturally, academically, linguistically. The volume combines contributions by prominent scholars and critics with essays by younger scholars, from a variety of backgrounds. The resulting plurality of perspective is indeed a source of new insights into the relations between writing and seeing, and it contributes to making this collection an exciting new contribution to word and image studies.

Alasdair Gray, author of the modern classics Lanark, Poor Things and 1982, Janine, is without doubt Scotland's greatest living novelist. Since trying (unsuccessfully) to buy him a drink in 1998, Rodge Glass, first tutee and then secretary to the author, takes on the role of biographer, charting Gray's life from unpublished and unrecognised son of a box-maker to septuagenarian "little grey deity" (as Will Self has called him). A Jewish Mancunian Boswell to Gray's Johnson, Glass seamlessly weaves a chronological narrative of his subject's life into his own diary of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, to create a vibrant and wonderfully textured portrait of a literary great.

A unique introduction, guide and reference work for students and readers of Scottish literature from the pre-medieval period.