Horst W Drescher – författare

This book shows how Alasdair Gray’s first novel, Lanark: A Life in 4 Books, shares some of the thematic and formal concerns of postmodernist literature. The analysis is preceded by an introductory chapter which relates Gray to both the English and the Scottish literary traditions. Next, the author focuses on Lanark and explores the way the novel offers a representation of society in terms of ontological instability and dystopia as well as the implications to be drawn from its experimental nature.

This book analyses the relationship between Presbyterians and Catholics in eighteenth-century Scotland. The author considers the weapons wielded against the Scottish Catholic Mission by the state and by the Church of Scotland – penal laws, Royal Bounty missions and SSPCK schools. Once the government no longer saw Catholics as a threat to the safety of the state, Presbyterians were left to fight their crusade on their own. Convinced as they were that the best strategy in order to stamp out Catholicism was to eradicate ignorance, Presbyterians seemed to give pride of place to education. The author, however, argues that – for all their criticism of the attitude of the Church of Rome in Catholic countries – Presbyterians used similar strategies to try and improve their standing in the Highlands.

This is a study of fiction by Scottish women spanning the late 1890s to the early 1930s. Seven authors are included: Violet Jacob, Mary and Jane Helen Findlater, Lorna Moon, Catherine Carswell, Willa Muir, and Nan Shepherd. It identifies a continuity of development within and between the women’s careers. Each evolved from writing narratives expected of fiction aimed at the women’s market to more innovative forms which increasingly questioned traditional values. From this perspective we can locate the authors in an intriguing relation to the contexts of Scottish literature, modernist sensibility, and to the feminism asserting itself in that age of upheaval.