Literature and Languages

Pathfoot A15

School of Arts and Humanities

Division of Literature and Languages

University of Stirling

Stirling

FK9 4LA
Scotland

UK

B.A. (Calgary), Ph.D. (Aberdeen)

Research interests in contemporary fiction; Anglophone vernacular writing; modern Scottish literature; the aesthetics of cultural nationalism; modernism and critical theory. A central preoccupation is theorising non-standard/vernacular/dialectal writing as 'literary' in its form and effect (as stylised), rather than as writing which merely copies, indexes or embodies some pre-given sociocultural condition. In order to view vernacular writing in this way, we have to estrange it from its own (Romantic) critical heritage, and re-examine the conventionalised 'authenticity effects' of the modern novel.

Articles on James Kelman (and masculinity, existentialism, canonicity, art-speech), Alistair MacLeod, William McIlvanney, Alice Munro, Andrew O'Hagan, Don Paterson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alan Warner, Scottish novels of education, ‘theory’ and cultural nationalism. Editor of Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman. Co-editor of the International Journal of Scottish Literature. With Suzanne Gilbert, I convene the MLitt in Modern Scottish Writing.

Currently completing a monograph on Kelman’s literary vernacular.

Thomas Christie - Ideology, Genre and National Identity in Popular Scottish Fiction, 1975-2006

Meghan McAvoy - A Critique of Scottish Literary Nationalism

Neil Syme - The Modern Uncanny: Textuality and Tradition in Post-1970s Scottish Fiction