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George Mackay Brown has long been recognised as one of the most original and important Scottish writers of the twentieth century. This book is the first comprehensive account of Brown's work from a philosophical perspective and offers a radical new approach to the study of Scottish literature. The importance of local community in the work of Scottish novelists ranging from Walter Scott to Neil M. Gunn has often been noted, but few critics have addressed the relation of this concept to current philosophical and sociological models of community. Timothy C. Baker uses Brown's work as a primary case study to demonstrate that the relationship between the individual and the community is a dominant narrative question in Scottish fiction.Baker traces the development of Brown's writing in relation to contemporary developments in the study of community, drawing on both continental and Anglo-American traditions. Focusing on Brown's novels, Baker argues for Brown's importance not only within a Scottish literary tradition, but as a major thinker of community. The book also suggests the utility of community, as opposed to nation and region, for productive discourse on modern literature. Combining close readings with theoretical elaborations, and including a broad national and historical overview, Baker offers a new perspective both on Brown's work and contemporary national literatures.Key Features:*Offers the first philosophically-informed critique of George Mackay Brown *Shows how fiction can contribute to an understanding of the problems of community in modernity*Suggests new directions for the study of contemporary Scottish literature*Takes into account Brown's late and posthumous writings as well as unpublished material not covered before

Following the recent call to ‘put the ocean’s agitation and historicity back onto our mental maps and into the study of literature’ (Yaeger 2010), this article addresses the histories and cultures of marine energy extraction in modern Scottish literature. The burgeoning discipline of the Energy Humanities has recently turned its attentions towards Scottish literature as a valuable area of study when contemplating the relationships between energy and cultural production. Most recently, scholars have focused their analysis on the histories of North Sea oil and gas production and have worked to juxtapose the long histories of land clearance in the Highlands and islands alongside contemporary narratives of exile and exploitation experienced by Scotland’s coastal oil communities. The forms of spatial injustice incurred through the recent histories of what Derek Gladwin terms ‘Oil Clearance’ (Gladwin 2017) or Graeme Macdonald identifies as ‘petro-marginalisation’ (Macdonald 2015), is often solely registered through terrestrial environments. This article urges the adoption of an oceanic perspective, one which registers how the extractive politics of modern petroculture in Scotland not only presents major challenges for terrestrial environments and communities, but holds specific ramifications for the ways in which we currently imagine and interact with oceanic space. Indeed, as Macdonald has noted, the North Sea is in many ways ‘wholly regarded as a productive environment of marine capitalism synonymous with oil’ (2015). What does it mean to read the ocean through oil? By adopting an oceanic perspective, this article considers the ways in which the exploitative dynamics of offshore petroculture in the 1970s coincides with an incredibly damaging and problematic cultural construction of the ocean. But as Scotland moves towards a new era of low-carbon energy production, how might this construction of the ocean change? The closing half of this article considers the ways in which the extractivist histories and spatial injustices of petroculture are resisted through contemporary poetic engagements with new marine-based energy technologies, namely, wave and tidal power. In examining a range of work from artists and poets such as Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, Lila Matsumoto and Hannah Imlach, this article further argues that the recent turn towards marine renewables not only signals a new future for a low-carbon Scotland, but that the advent of renewable technologies provides contemporary poets with new materials through which to imagine alternative models of community, power, and relation in an era of environmental change.

Mackay Brown's specific role in this tradition is illuminated by the way his novel Greenvoe (1972) becomes an intertextual exchange with Hopkins. [...]as part of conveying this concern for the environment, Mackay Brown turned to the crystalline clarity of language that Hopkins articulated in his poems. [...]the concluding passages of the novel are caught up into the immanence of the ritual they depict.

RésuméLa poésie de George Mackay Brown, pour l’essentiel narrative ou dramatique, ne contiendrait, à en croire son auteur, aucune trace de celui-ci. Ses poèmes lyriques n’échappent pas à la règle, puisque ils s’affichent le plus souvent comme ayant été « écrits » par d’autres poètes, historiques ou fictifs, qu’il aurait simplement « adaptés ». Les très rares poèmes d’amour composés en son nom propre s’avèrent basculer vers un mode narratif laissant apparemment peu de place à l’expression des sentiments. On s’efforce de montrer ici, d’une part, que par le biais des scénarios mis en place se révèlent les désirs enfouis du locuteur et, d’autre part, que la voix que ces poèmes donnent à entendre est indubitablement celle de Mackay Brown. Le fait qu’elle ressemble beaucoup à celle des pièces lyriques prétendument écrites par d’autres suggère après coup que les « auteurs » de celles-ci ne sont que des personae . AbstractGeorge Mackay Brown claims that his poetry, which is mostly narrative or dramatic, contains no traces of himself. His lyric verse, usually presented as “authored” by other historical or fictitious poets and merely “adapted” by him, seems to be no exception. As to those very few love poems written in his own name, they shift back to a narrative mode that seems to leave little room for the expression of feelings. This essay aims to show that the very scenarios played out in these latter pieces disclose the speaker’s innermost desires and that the voice which is audible in them is unmistakably Brown’s own. Because it is also very similar to the voice of those lyric poems supposedly written by others, it appears in hindsight that the latter are but personae through which the poet expresses his personal emotions.

The wall, as constructed, is 519.5mm thick, plus or minus the irregularities of reused flagstone. It consists of 12.5mm plasterboard, a vapour barrier, 145mm timber studs, 150mm ‘Rockwool’ insulation, 12mm Far Eastern marine grade plywood, ‘Tyvek’ building membrane, a 50mm cavity, stainless-steel wall ties, an unforeseen leaf of 100mm concrete block, and a heavily debated skin of 200–300mm reused flagstone. It follows the original footprint of an 1840s longhouse, now reduced, perhaps, to a representational role. Built by a team of three – two architects and a marine biologist – this wall is the result of five years of planning, sketching, drawing, specifying, sourcing, shipping, and self-building. It contains adaptations, compromises, guilt and uncertainties. The project draws both from phenomenological beliefs concerning a site embedded with accumulated memories, and rationalised predictions developed from a Modernist architectural education. The constructed result stands as a negotiation between theoretical aims and the pragmatics of a self-build on an exposed island.

(1921–96), Scottish poet, novelist, playwright and short story writer, born in Orkney, where he remained

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading