Twentieth Century Scottish Drama
Edited by Randall Stevenson & Edited by Cairns Craig
Available as eBook
Ever since the major revival of dramatic writing and production in the 1970s, the style and the subject matter of Scottish writing for stage and screen has been a continuing influence on our contemporary culture, exciting, offending and challenging audiences in equal measure. Yet modern Scottish drama has a history of controversy, conflict and entertainment going back to the 1920s, notable at every turn for the vigour of its language and its direct confrontation with telling issues.
The plays in this anthology offer a unique chance to grasp the different topics and also the recurrent themes of Scottish drama in the twentieth century.
Gathered together in a single omnibus volume, there is the poetic eeriness of Barrie and the political commitment of Joe Corrie and Sue Glover; there is the Brechtian debate of Bridie and the verbal brilliance of John Byrne and Liz Lochhead; there is working-class experience and feminist insight; broad Scots and existential anxiety; street realism and a meeting with the devil; social injustice and raucous humour; historical comedy and tragic loss. Here is both the breadth and the continuity of the modern Scottish tradition in a single volume.
Edited by Randall Stevenson & Edited by Cairns Craig
CAIRNS CRAIG was born in Kilmarnock and educated at the University of Edinburgh where he is Head of the English Literature Department and Director of the Centre for the History of Ideas in Scotland. He has written widely on Scottish literature and culture and was General Editor of the four-volume History of Scottish Literature (1987-9). His books on Scottish subjects include Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (1996), adn The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (1999). He is a member of the editorial board for Canongate
RANDALL STEVENSON is Reader in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He was born in Banff, grew up in Glasgow, and went to university in Edinburgh and Oxford. He is the editor of Scottish Theatre since the Seventies (1996) and the author of Scottish Modernist Fiction (1992, 1998); A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth Century Novel in Britain (1993); The British Novel since the Thirties (1986), as well as many articles on modernist and postmodernist fiction. He regularly reviews Scottish theatre for the Times Literary Supplement.