Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is the best-known and most critically acclaimed of Liz Lochhead's plays. Dramatising the religious and political history of Scotland from a particularly female point of view, it remains popular with audiences and with the author herself, who sees the work as "a metaphor for the Scots today". Margery Palmer McCulloch's SCOTNOTE study guide provides a background to the history and to the dramatic presentation, as well as giving an overview of the modern context of Lochhead's play, for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

In writing Just Duffy, a novel set amidst the urban decay of Lanarkshire, Robin Jenkins has created a modern-day Confession of a Justified Sinner. Convinced of his own rectitude, appalled at the moral squalor around him, Duffy declares war on society. Ridiculous, yet horrifying at the same time, his campaign builds to a terrifying conclusion. Beset with ambiguity, Duffy is a ferocious indictment of Calvinistic moral certainty, of a struggle for good which results in only evil and destruction. The deeply ironic title bears witness to the mismatch of Duffy's aspiration against his own insignificance. The themes of this novel are central to all Jenkins' work. In its stark simplicity Just Duffy lays claim to being one of his most significant and powerful novels. Its inexorable drive and power bear witness to a modern Greek tragedy played out on a Scottish stage.

The twentieth-century Scottish renaissance - the literary and artistic revival which followed the end of the First World War - advanced a claim for a distinctive Scottish identity: cultural, political and national. Unlike earlier nineteenth-century Celtic revivals, this renaissance was both outward-looking and confidently contemporary; it embraced continental European influences as well as those of Anglophone writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Lawrence, and contributed to the development of what we now call modernism. This collection of essays, from fourteen scholars, illustrates the strongly international and modernist dimension of Scotland's interwar revival, and illuminates the relationships between Scottish and non-Scottish writers and contexts. It also includes two chapters on the contribution made to this revival by Scottish visual art and music. These essays are based on papers originally presented at the 38th ASLS Annual Conference, 'Scottish and International Modernism', held at the University of Stirling, 6-7 June 2009.

Hugh MacDiarmid is widely considered the most significant Scottish poet since Robert Burns and the major literary force in twentieth-century Scottish culture. His poetry is both compelling in its intellectual challenge and captivating in its lyrical beauty. This book explores the principal thematic and aesthetic preoccupations in MacDiarmid's work, relating his poetry to key national and international concerns in modern culture and politics. It offers a vital updating of MacDiarmid scholarship through contributions by leading scholars of the modern period which provide a contextual and interpretive guide to this challenging writer. All of MacDiarmid's major poetic works are examined in addition to a representative selection of his diverse output in other genres, from journalism to shorter fiction, autobiography and political polemic. His poetry and his place in the cultural history of Scottish, British and international modernism will be contemporised through consideration of his significance from a European, transatlantic and ecological global perspective. This collection of essays on MacDiarmid will draw on the creative and discursive writings made newly available through the recent publication of previously uncollected work. Key features: * Updates and internationalises MacDiarmid studies * Provides informed analysis and contextualisation of MacDiarmid's poetry through close readings of texts * Utilises recently published MacDiarmid material * Contributes to a re-drawing of the map of international literary modernism

Hugh MacDiarmid is widely considered the most significant Scottish poet since Robert Burns and the major literary force in twentieth-century Scottish culture. His poetry is both compelling in its intellectual challenge and captivating in its lyrical beauty. This book explores the principal thematic and aesthetic preoccupations in MacDiarmid's work, relating his poetry to key national and international concerns in modern culture and politics. It offers a vital updating of MacDiarmid scholarship through contributions by leading scholars of the modern period which provide a contextual and interpretive guide to this challenging writer. All of MacDiarmid's major poetic works are examined in addition to a representative selection of his diverse output in other genres, from journalism to shorter fiction, autobiography and political polemic. His poetry and his place in the cultural history of Scottish, British and international modernism will be contemporised through consideration of his significance from a European, transatlantic and ecological global perspective. This collection of essays on MacDiarmid will draw on the creative and discursive writings made newly available through the recent publication of previously uncollected work. Key features: * Updates and internationalises MacDiarmid studies * Provides informed analysis and contextualisation of MacDiarmid's poetry through close readings of texts * Utilises recently published MacDiarmid material * Contributes to a re-drawing of the map of international literary modernism

This innovative book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean. Key Features *The first study of a Scottish modernism extending in its impact to the 1950s and drawing on influences from British and European modernism *Original perspectives on the literature of the period through discussion of a range of writers and writing genres *Detailed consideration of the work of women writers in the context of modernism and in their response to social change *A contribution to the expansion of the idea of modernism in its focus both on the modernist artist's role in social and national renewal and on writing from the peripheries of small town, rural and island cultures in contrast to metropolitan culture