An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Glenda Norquay (Visiting Research Fellow 2021; Liverpool John Moores University):
Outruns, undertows, surfaces and deeps: topographic entanglements in Scottish island fiction
Abstract:
‘Islandness’, argue Vannini and Taggart (Cultural Geographies, 20:2, 2013) presents a type of ‘situated affect or feeling’ and might be understood as a mode of ‘active, perceptual engagement.’ This paper investigates the explosion, over the past decade or so, of island writing from a Scottish context, which is itself part of a wider critical attention to tidal zones, oceanic instabilities and coastal futures. While the finest island literature in recent years – by Gavin Francis, Kathleen Jamie, Laura Watts – offers exciting experiments in creative non-fiction and is highly conscious in its ecological engagement, this paper attends to a broader set of novels which raise questions about our complex spatial attachments and detachments. By reading across non-fiction writing and novels by Elizabeth Arthur, Linda Cracknell, Sarah Moss and Amy Sackville it asks what ‘islandness’ affords in these more domestic narratives aimed at broad readerships and considers how the ‘sensuous materiality of the world’ (Sten Pultz Moslund, Literature’s Sensuous Geographies, 2015) is enacted in different genres. As part of my wider project on topographies in Scottish fiction, the paper further addresses questions of how place is ‘brought forth’ in fiction and the potentialities of different modes of writing in responding to climate change and the Anthropocene.
Biography:
Glenda Norquay is Professor of Scottish Literary Studies at Liverpool John Moores University and Director of their Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History. She did her first degree and PhD at the University of Edinburgh. She publishes in two main areas: Robert Louis Stevenson studies and Scottish women’s writings. Her monographs, R.L. Stevenson, literary networks and transatlantic publishing in the 1890s: the author incorporated (2020) which profiles a series of figures who worked with Stevenson in the context of changing mobility and new global publishing at the end of the nineteenth-century and Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading (2007) were both supported by research fellowships at IASH. She is editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (2012) and has published extensively on Scottish women’s writing, most recently ‘“Daughterlands”: Personal and Political Mappings in Scottish Women’s Poetry’ Contemporary Women’s Writing (2020).
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2