This book charts the course of Scottish Critical Theory since the 1960s. It provocatively argues that 'French' critical-theoretical ideas have developed in tandem with Scottish writing during this period. Its themes can be read as a breakdown in Scottish Enlightenment thinking after empire - precisely the process which permitted the rise of 'theory'.The book places within a wider theoretical context writers such as Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, James Kelman, Alexander Trocchi, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh, as well as more recent work by Alan Riach and Pat...

This Companion brings together an international 'Brodie set' of critics to trace the history, impact, reception and major themes of Spark's work, from her early poetry to her last novel. It encompasses the range of Spark's output, pursuing contextual lines of approach including biography, geography, gender, identity, nation and religion, and considering her legacy and continuing influence in the twenty-first century. Spark emerges here as a serious thinker on issues as diverse as the Welfare State, secularisation, decolonisation, and anti-psychiatry, and a writer whose work may be placed...

This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly as hastened by the spectre of China in the First Opium War, Japan’s modernity was bound up with a convergence with British Newtonian cosmology, something underscored by the British presence in Meiji Japan and the British education of key Meiji state-makers. Moreover the thinking behind Britain’s own...