Search results for ""Author Cairns Craig""

This book proposes that Christian existentialism and, in particular, the work of Soren Kierkegaard, helped shape Spark's religious commitments and her artistic innovations.

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Muriel Spark's oeuvre is contextualised in the tradition of Christian existentialism and its insistence on 'being towards death'.

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These three books reflect the beginnings of one of the most radical and exhilarating figures in modern literatureIncandescent Limbo recounts White's years in Paris. Many a writer in the modern era had made Paris a focal point of his or her activity, but probably no one made more of it or got more out of it than Kenneth White. While exploring a labyrinthine underworld, the book is fundamentally an autoanalysis and traces the birth of the writer as an intellectual nomad.Letters from Gourgounel takes us from the city to a wild part of south-eastern France, the Ard che, where White undertakes a resourcing in an elementary context. Hailed in England as a 'fascinating curiosity of literature', this book not only made White famous overnight in France, it was seen there as a turning point in the contemporary situation. In the third book, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, the intellectual nomad begins his moves across territories and cultures. After passing through the London underground of the sixties, then delving into the ground of his native Scotland and neighbouring Ireland, we shift back to the Continent, accumulating experience on different levels in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, before concluding the cycle in North Africa. The trilogy is not only a summary of White's itinerary in its initial stages, it opens up a whole intellectual and cultural programme.

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Published originally in two volumes in 1890, this extraordinary study of primitive myth and magic, collected from sources around the world, led Frazer to identify parallel patterns of ritual, symbols and belief across many centuries and many different cultures. Frazer's learning inspired a whole generation of ethnographers and comparative anthropologists, and had a particularly powerful effect on many other thinkers and writers such as Sigmund Freud, D H Lawrence, Joyce, Yeats and T S Eliot.

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A critical appraisal of Scotland's cultural wealth and global distinction'The Wealth of the Nation' explores how Scotland has continued to assert its distinctive cultural difference despite the three-hundred-year union with England and the modern forces of globalisation. Dealing with Scotland since the eighteenth century, the study analyses how Scottish culture defined itself within the British Empire and how, in the late twentieth century, it recovered from the collapse of the Empire to rebuild the value of its cultural past. Through its focus on the role of memory in philosophy, literature and the visual arts, readers will gain understanding of the influence that modern Scottish writers and artists have had on contemporary Scottish nationalism. The book argues that political nationalism in modern Scotland is founded on a cultural revival that began in the 1950s and 60s but gained momentum from resistance to the outcome of the 1979 devolution referendum. That resistance, and the creative achievements which it generated, provoked a re-examination of the nation's cultural history, revealing a wealth previously denied or forgotten.

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Three collections of essays whose aim is to express the cartography and the experience of a live, open worldThese essays all explore Scottish subjects and the wider issues of geopetics. This volume starts with On Scottish Ground by delving into forgotten cultural resources. Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath explores more socio-political considerations before opening out to a larger space of cosmological meditation in The Wanderer and his Charts.

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Romantic Empiricism is a timely collection of essays by established and emerging scholars, which represents a paradigm shift for the study of British Romanticism. The volume challenges the received view that German Idealist philosophy constitutes the main intellectual reference point for British Romantic writers, arguing instead that the tradition of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, largely overlooked by literary scholars, is a significant influence on Romantic thought. The essays in the collection examine a variety of canonical and non-canonical Romantic authors in the light of this fresh interpretative context, ranging from Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Hamilton to Robert Burns and S.T. Coleridge. The volume is prefaced by a substantial theoretical introduction, which sets out the historical and interpretative case for the relevance of Common Sense philosophy for the study of British Romanticism.

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