Beyond Identity: New Horizons in Modern Scottish Poetry

by Attila Dósa

In Beyond Identity, thirteen of Scotland's best known poets reflect upon the theoretical, practical and political considerations involved in the act of writing. They furnish a unique guide to contemporary Scottish poetry, discussing a range of issues that include nationhood, education, language, religion, landscape, translation and identity. John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn, Kathleen Jamie, Edwin Morgan, Kenneth White and others, together with such noted experimentalists as Frank Kuppner, Tom Leonard and Richard Price, explore questions about the relationship between social, economic and ecological realities and their poetic transformation. These interviews are set within the altered political context that followed from the re-establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1999 and the potential of a renewed engagement with wider European culture.

332 pages, ebook

First published December 28, 2009

About the author

Attila Dósa is an Associate Professor at the University of Miskole in northern Hungary. He was a Chevening Scholar at the Uiversity of Oxford and received his PhD from the University of St. Andrews. His research is on the history of Scottish literature. His contributions in this field include the volume Beyond Identity: New Horizons in Scottish Poetry (2009) and chapters in Carla Sassi (ed.) The International Companion to Scottish Poetry (2015), Milena Kostić and Soňa Šnircová (eds.) Growing Up a Woman (2019), and Jennifer Stock (ed.) Contemporary Literary Criticism (2021). He is a reviewer for Forum for Modern Language Studies and his monograph on Douglas Dunn's poetry is forthcoming in Glasgow (2023).