Literature and Theatre
Stevenson's concern with the representation of historical experience was in some respects characteristic of his time. In order to explore Stevenson's response to conflicting imperatives, this chapter examines questions of narrative form, language and truth which emerge out his relationship with one specific and, for him personally resonant, period of Scottish history. Stevenson's engagement with the aesthetic issues raised by the combination of religion and history is most evident in a novel which adopts quite a different historical context: The Master of Ballantrae. The power of Covenanting history, the delight that literature appeared to exercise upon Stevenson as a reader, is dependent upon its uninterpreted qualities, the jumble of voices, the brute incidents from the cockpit of experience. As a reader of both Patrick Walker and John Howie, Stevenson encountered alternative responses to the distance between language and event; as a text, The Master of Ballantrae inhabits that space.
Welsh's second major publication, The Acid House, comprises a collection of short stories and a novella, which had, in large part, been written coterminously with much of the Trainspotting materials. Indeed, the story provides a satire on contemporary masculinity, particularly the idea of the caring, sharing New Man in touch with his feminine side. The typographic experimentalism, most evident in the textual mosaic of 'The Acid House', not only visually undermines the sanctity and unity of the printed text on the page but also further dismantles the capacity of conventional characterisation to formulate identity through the construction of stable social 'types' and 'typical' personalities. The film adaptation of The Acid House comprises reworkings of three stories: 'A Soft Touch', 'The Granton Star Cause' and 'The Acid House'. Welsh avowedly intended his screenplay to resist the Cool Britannia appropriation undergone by Trainspotting and its implication in the institutions of mainstream cinema.
The Commissione parlamentare antimafia presented in 1993 a report entitled Mafia e Politica, the first time this theme had ever been examined by an official government body. The report examines the factors in the history of the post-war Italy which gave the mafia some political 'legitimacy', and identifies the successive phases of the evolution of its relationship with the Italian state. Salvatore Giuliano (1922-50) a bandit leader who started as an opponent of the mafia, but ended being manipulated by them. His men allied themselves with the separatist movement in the hope of gaining a pardon from a new government.
The afterword makes the point that this book answers the call for a book about the shadows and exiles of the early modern world, as well as a set of further reflections on that baroque world’s mysterious reticulations and connections. The sequence of histories of exceptions and ‘shadow communities’ serves to cast light on the majorities and the mainstreams. There are also a few chapters which are simply about major continental artefacts or phenomena which are internationally important tokens or examples of their times.
Alexander Seton, first Earl of Dunfermline, is a figure of great cultural significance in early modern Britain. Apart from his political standing in Scotland, and his care of the future Charles I, he is important as the first alumnus of the elite Collegio Romano to return to Britain with a complete baroque/humanist education. His building projects, his extraordinary painted gallery at Musselburgh, and his cosmopolitan library all bear witness to the importation of a full contemporary cultural system from continental Europe. At the turn of the seventeenth century, when England was increasingly isolated from the Continent, and Scotland had severed ties with Catholic Europe but had not yet developed the later symbiosis with the new academies of the United Provinces, Seton and his activities offer an extraordinary case of a Scottish cosmopolitan cultural polity.
To read Alice Munro's stories is to discover the delights of seeing two worlds at once: an ordinary everyday world and the shadowy map of another imaginary or secret world laid over the real one. This book proposes to develop the imagery of maps and mapping which is so popular in contemporary feminist criticism and postcolonial writing and which happens to be peculiarly appropriate for Munro. Instead of leaping back, Munro has continued to experiment with the short story form, always attempting to represent more adequately the complex layering of the way things are or rather the ways things might be interpreted from different perspectives. Certainly, Munro's narrative methods have changed over the years, as she allows more and more possible meanings to circulate in every story while refusing definitive interpretations or plot resolution. The book discusses Munro's eight books in chronological sequence. In every collection, the author comments on the design of the volume while focusing discussion on three or four stories, aiming always for a double emphasis on thematic continuities and on Munro's ongoing experiments within the short story form and within small-town fiction, both of which are marks of her distinctive Canadian inheritance linking her in a tradition which goes back to nineteenth-century writers like Sara Jeanette Duncan.
Charlotte Yonge had an immature mind, an undistinguished style, and the values of a pious schoolgirl', Robert Liddell complained, as long ago as 1947. If Yonge herself ever thought of her life as 'starved' or limited, it was in the area of childhood companionship. Yonge's whole life was spent writing: not just family chronicles, but historical tales, history books for young people, and a history of Christian names. Yonge is particularly sympathetic to the dilemmas of the eldest children, who suddenly find themselves, at fifteen or sixteen, responsible for the welfare of crowds of juniors irresponsibly brought into the world by exhausted parents. Despite her emphasis on family values, the movement of these family chronicles is actually towards a splitting and scattering of families who were once crammed together in claustrophobic English houses.
Now largely forgotten, like many other women writers whose careers began as George Eliot's ended, Jessie Fothergill was highly successful in her day, best known for an exotic romance but also acclaimed as a regional writer and for her investigation of social, moral and political questions of the day. Fothergill was born in Manchester in 1851, the eldest child of Thomas Fothergill, a cotton manufacturer. His stories of his boyhood in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, in a farmhouse owned by his Quaker family since 1668, were part of what inspired her passionate interest in the countryside, while her pride in her yeoman descent helps to characterise the radicalism she espoused as an adult. Whether, if Fothergill had lived longer and her health had allowed, her determined investigation of the relativity of good and evil might have taken her in new directions too is obviously unanswerable.
In September 1955 Ashbery left America for France. While in Paris Ashbery was in regular correspondence with his New York School friends, his letters containing the poems of The Tennis Court Oath and, subsequently, Rivers and Mountains. The first poems Ashbery wrote while in Paris, the poems he published in 1962 in his controversial volume The Tennis Court Oath, were remarkably different not only from the poems he published in Some Trees but from almost anything else he has written. Ashbery's whole situation was propelling his writing towards heroic self-exile. But so too, crucially, was his culture, American intellectuals of every stripe, during the 1950s, calling on the avant-garde as the last line of defence against the barbarian forces of popular culture. Contrary to Ashbery's expectations, the poems of The Tennis Court Oath did begin to secure an audience.
Ashbery's poetry has long tried to foster the kind of relation with the reader that his subversive stories of literary history and poetic influence imply, and so, as promised, the lectures shed a general light on his writing. Ashbery wrote Flow Chart between December 1987 and July 1988. Flow Chart can often be heard straining against itself: testing and hoping to overcome the limits and possibly devastating implications of its occasional poetic approach. What Ashbery seems, not unnaturally, especially alive to here is the imminence of his ending, the effect of which imminence, as the poet writes, is to generate a sense immanent crisis. Every poem in And the Stars Were Shining has an apocalyptic edge to it, every moment carries the potential for catastrophe. In the shorter poems this plays out in a series of crises, disasters hitting then passing as if nothing had happened.