David Goldie was educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford. Now retired, he taught for over thirty years at the University of Strathclyde where he was Head of the Department of English and Head of the School of Humanities. He is currently President of the Association for Scottish Literature.
His research interests are in twentieth-century English and Scottish Literature and Literary Criticism, with particular interests in the literature and popular culture of the First World War and in contemporary fiction. He has written for the London Review of Books and has contributed many essays to research collections and standard works including The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, The Blackwell Companion to Scottish Literature, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His own books include Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth Century Literature, Scotland in the Nineteenth-Century World, From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914-1945, and The Scottish Poetry of the First and Second World Wars.
Summary of talk
This talk will cover the recent history of Scottish literature (particularly the Scottish novel) from the publication of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in 1981 to the present, focusing in particular on the ways in which modern Scottish writing deals with issues of narrative experimentation, genre, and the use of dialect. One of the key questions that will be addressed concerns the national dimension of Scottish literature. Can Scotland truly be said to have a literature of its own? And does it really need a literature of its own?