Michael Gardiner

Claire Westall

This interdisciplinary collection is a first step in the process of dismantling the imperial and unionist dominance of the discipline of English Literature and building a literary history and national literature of England. The collection brings together some of the best known and most incisive commentators on England, Englishness and English Literature from political and literary fields in order to rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British Union, the place of English Literature within the Union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation. The collection comprises fifteen essays, organised into four parts, moving from political discussions of the form of a devolved or independent England, through a consideration of England in canonical and contemporary literature, to an exploration of the role of the national in English Literature's disciplinary logic.

Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature

Literature of an Independent England

The first full-length study of Scottish literature using a post-devolutionary understanding of postcolonial studies. Using a comparative model and spanning over two hundred years of literary history from the 18th Century to the contemporary, this collection of 19 new essays by some of the leading figures in the field presents a range of perspectives on Scottish and postcolonial writing. The essays explore Scotland's position on both sides of the colonial divide and also its role as instigator of a devolutionary process with potential consequences for British Imperialism.

Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives

Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature

The Public on the Public argues that in the United Kingdom efforts to resuscitate the public as a popular opposition to global capital's narrowing elite are largely misguided. Tracking Britain's understanding of the public from the inception of its state, this discussion intervenes in longstanding debates about the decline of the public in order to stress the public's ongoing and anti-popular constitutional role as the continuity of financial trust. It follows the fiscal duties of the social and cultural life of the public, and describes how the public protects itself from popular sovereignty through systems of self-reporting within and across politically foreclosing institutions. From the party system to the BBC, and from the imperial remnants of commonwealth heritage through to media, arts and educational efforts to galvanise 'public value', the public has insisted on a mode of compulsory inclusion that recent constitutional fissures have allowed us to look beyond in the search for more substantial bases of popular and political action. Here the contention is that, in Britain's case, the resistance to popular determination enabled by the public has been so successful that the term public must be re-read as politically paralysing. Indeed, the problem, or our problem, is the public – that which we are so often told will bring us together and provide for us.

The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure

The Public on the Public

Michael Gardiner examines the ideology of the discipline of English Literature, arguing that it is intimately linked with the emergence of the English State.

The State, the Nation and the Canon

The Constitution of English Literature

This book describes the recent Scottish independence referendum as the latest incarnation of a contest between two times on one hand, an ideally continuous time beyond determination underpinning financial sovereignty, on the other the interruptions to this ideal continuity inherent in human action.

Time and Action in the Scottish Independence Referendum

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge. In his analysis Gardiner engages with the work of a number of significant theorists and approaches that have been marginalized by mainstream academe, including: *The French tradition of everyday life theorising, from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre, and from the Situationist International to Michel de Certeau *Agnes Heller and the relationship between the everyday, rationality and ethics *Carnival, prosaics and intersubjectivity in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin *Dorothy E. Smith's feminist perspective on everyday life. Critiques of Everyday Life demonstrates the importance of an alternative, multidisciplinary everyday life paradigm and offers a myriad of new possibilities for critical social and cultural theorising and empirical research.

An Introduction

Critiques of Everyday Life

Willy Maley

An international line-up of authors trace the form, history, impact, reception, and decisive themes of Muriel Spark, from "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" to "The Finishing School." Original essays confront Spark's entire oeuvre& mdashpoetry, prose, and criticism& mdash;and consider how matters of biography, geography, gender, identity, nation, and religion are at work& mdash;and at play& mdash;in Spark's multifaceted writing. This anthology shows Spark to be a consummate artist as well as a proactive and persuasive thinker on social questions, including the welfare state, secularization, decolonization, and anti-psychiatry. The volume compares Spark alongside contemporaries including J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor, and it ends with a look at Spark's legacy in the twenty-first century.

The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark

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 alongside Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, and Lessing. The critics collected here are mindful of how, although overwhelmingly known as a novelist, by the time of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, Spark already had a significant profile through poetry, biographical criticism, and literary journalism, as chair of the Poetry Society and editor of the Poetry Review, and as author or co-author of a number of scholarly studies of writers including Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Cardinal Newman, and John Masefield. Within a relatively modest space this Companion touches on the whole range of Spark's work and, in introducing the oeuvre thematically for those looking to explore this elegant and challenging author further, also sets the agenda for future Spark studies.

Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark

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 Kane, who can be seen to take the 'post-Enlightenment' narrative forward. In doing so, it draws on the work of the Scottish thinkers John Macmurray and R.D. Laing as well as the continental philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Paul Virilio.

Michael Gardiner

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