Arts of Resistance is an original exploration that extends beyond the arts into the context of politics and political change. In three wide-ranging exchanges prompted by American blues singer Linda MacDonald-Lewis, artist Alexander Moffat and poet Alan Riach, discuss cultural, political and artistic movements, the role of the artist in society and the effect of environment on artists from all disciplines.
Arts of Resistance examines the lives and work of leading figures from Scotland’s arts world in the twentieth century, concentrating on poets and artists but also including writers, musicians and architectural visionaries such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Patrick Geddes. Poets studied include Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead; artists include William McTaggart, William Johnstone and the Scottish Colourists.
The investigation into the connection between the arts and political culture includes historical issues, from British imperialism to a devolved Scotland. Finally, the contribution to poetry and art of each major Scottish city is discussed: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee.
Highly illustrated with paintings and poems, Arts of Resistance is a beautifully produced book providing facts and controversial opinions.
 | Alan RiachAlan Riach holds the Chair of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. His fifth book of poems, Homecoming (2009), follows Clearances (2001), First & Last Songs (1995), An Open Return (1991) and This Folding Map (1990). He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (1991), The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid (1999) and Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography (2005), and the general editor of the Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid. He is the co-author with Alexander Moffat of Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2008), described by the Times Literary Supplement as “a landmark book”, and Arts of Independence: the Cultural Argument and Why It Matters Most (2014). He is the editor of The Hunterian Poems: Poems to Paintings from The Hunterian Collection at the University of Glasgow (2015) and The International Companion to Edwin Morgan (2015) and the co-editor of The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks by Wilson Harris (1992), Scotlands: Poets and the Nation (2004) and The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (2009). Born in Scotland, in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in 1957, he went to school in Kent and completed his first degree in English Literature at Cambridge University and his PhD in Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, before working at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, 1986-2000. Since 1 January 2001, he has been working in Scotland. |
