Abstract:

The phrase Hugh MacDiarmid used for the national regeneration of literary, cultural and political priorities in the 1920s has not always, consistently or easily been accepted. Its relationship with international Modernism is sometimes contested. This illustrated talk links it back to the European Renaissance in Scotland via William Dunbar and Allan Ramsay, and sketches contexts for the movement’s poetry alongside the visual arts and music of the period, while establishing MacDiarmid’s place in a lineage of Flaubert and Joyce. It concludes by coming forward to contemporary scholarly revision of its history and the unfinished business of its purpose.

Biography:

Born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, educated at Cambridge and Glasgow, Alan Riach went to the University of Waikato, New Zealand, as Associate Professor in 1986. He returned to Scotland in 2001 as Reader in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, where he is now Professor. He is the author of works of criticism on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, editor of MacDiarmid’s collected works for Carcanet Press, and has written or edited several volumes on twentieth century Scottish literature. He is co-author with Alexander Moffat of two books on art and culture in modern Scotland.

Riach has published six collections of his own poetry and has recently worked on English-language versions of 18th-century Gaelic poems.