Alasdair Gray (19342019) is widely recognised as a key figure in Scottish literature and culture. His work reached a new audience in 2024 due to the release of the Oscar-nominated adaptation of his novel Poor Things. In the wake of this recent attention, The Edinburgh Companion to Alasdair Gray and the Arts interrogates both Grays literary and visual artistic practice as well as, crucially, facilitating conversation between these forms. With chapters on his prefatory spaces, his depictions of women, his complex relationship to empire and his role as a public intellectual, it provides a historicised view of Grays output while also introducing fresh critical approaches. The accounts of Grays visual art gathered here provide new insights into his collaborative projects, including his work with fellow artists and assistants on large-scale murals like Òran Mór and the Hillhead Subway commission, as well as his mobilisation of exhibitions not only for himself but in support of contemporary and more junior artists. Featuring contributions from prominent authors, academics, artists, politicians and curators, this Companion explores Grays political commitments and artistic partnerships to understand how his work has been remade and reincarnated, particularly in transmedial ways.
Arvustused
This collection of essays pays full tribute to Alasdair Gray as one of Scotlands most important creative forces. Bringing together sharp critical analyses of his writing, thoughtful interpretations of his visual works, new readings of his politics, and the voices of those who worked with him, it maps the interactions of text, images and ideas that characterised a career of inimitable productivity. By structuring the volume around his engagement with politics and community, his collaborations, and adaptions of his work, the editors highlight the importance of Grays literary and political interventions, his intellectual generosity, and the nature of his influence on the arts in Scotland and beyond. These likely and unlikely stories are underpinned by substantial archival research and brilliantly supported by illustrations illuminating both his life and his importance as a visual artist. The collection offers new perspectives on Grays biography, his working practices, and his impact not only on other writers and artists but on a country shaping a sense of itself. In the process the book remains faithful to the unique combination of lively mischief and intellectual commitment that made Alasdair Gray an imaginative iconoclast of international importance. -- Glenda Norquay, Liverpool John Moores University
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: On What Led to Alasdair Gray and the Arts
Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon, Camille Manfredi and Kirsten Stirling
Part I: Alasdair Gray, Politics and Community
1. Man of Independent Mind: Alasdair Gray and the Scottish Constitutional
Question
Eilidh Whiteford
2. The matter of Scotland: Alasdair Gray and Hugh MacDiarmid
Scott Lyall
3. One Great Soul or Mind or Force: Alasdair Gray and Empire
Joseph H. Jackson
4. Alasdair Gray as a Public Intellectual
Carla Sassi
5. The Coherent Panopticon: Seeing Things from Every Side and Firmly Drawing
a Line
Alan Riach
6. Mirrors reflecting mirrors: Gray Writing Women, Writing Men
Kirsten Stirling
7. Alasdair Grays Disability Imagination
Arianna Introna
8. Taoism and Sociopolitical Allegories in Alasdair Grays Short Stories
Ning He and Hongling Lyu
Part II: Alasdair Gray in Collaboration
9. The Working Practices of Alasdair Gray
Nichol Wheatley
10. Alasdair Gray and the Art of the Creative Response: From The Star to
The Crystal Egg and Back, Across Visual and Literary Practice
Rodge Glass
11. their talk of poetry / how I should write my own: Alasdair Grays
Englishing of Dante
Daragh OConnell
12. How Lanark Ends
John Purser
13. Alasdair Gray and the Art of Prefaces
Camille Manfredi and Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon
14. Word-Image Relationships: Alasdair Grays Shades of White,
Iconotextuality and Beyond
Anthony Remy
15. My instinctive decisions are also conscious ones: The Typography and
Lettering of Alasdair Gray, from Micro to Monumental
Edwin Pickstone
Part III: Mediating and Adapting Alasdair Gray
16. The Exhibitions of Alasdair Gray
Jenny Brownrigg
17. Fictio and Facta: Alasdair Grays Spatial Performativity
Federica Giardino
18. From Print to Pixel: Poor Things: A Novel Guide and the Digital
Reinterpretation of Alasdair Grays Novel Forms
Rachel Loughran
19. Adapting Poor Things for the Screen
Duncan Petrie
20. Building a Legacy through The Alasdair Gray Archive
Sorcha Dallas
21. Adapting Lanark for the stage
David Greig
Notes on Contributors
Index
Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon is Professor of British Literature at Aix-Marseille Université (AMU). Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Scottish fiction. She is the author of The Space of Fiction: Voices from Scotland in a Post-devolution Age (2015), Alasdair Gray: Marges et Effets de Miroirs (2004) and has contributed a chapter to Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds, ed. Camille Manfredi (2014). She is also the editor of Women and Scotland: Literature, Culture, Politics (2020) and, with Camille Manfredi and Scott Hames, of Scottish Writing after the Devolution: Edges of the New (2022). Camille Manfredi is Professor of Scottish literature at the University of Western Brittany. She is the author of Alasdair Gray: le faiseur dEcosse (2012) and Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art (2019), editor of Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds (2014), and co-editor, with Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon and Scott Hames, of Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New (2022). Kirsten Stirling is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Scottish literature and early modern poetry. She is the author of Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text (2008), Peter Pans Shadows in the Literary Imagination (2012) and Picturing Divinity in John Donnes Writings (2024) as well as several edited collections.
