Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago

by Glenda Norquay (Editor), Gerry Smyth (Editor), Murdo MacDonald (Contributor)

Across the margins offers a comparative, theoretically informed analysis of the cultural formation of the Atlantic Archipelago. In its overall conception and in specific contributions (including an introductory essay), this collection demonstrates the benefits of working across the disciplines of history, geography, literature and cultural studies, but also presents new configurations of cultural forms hitherto associated with specifically national and sub-national literatures.

The essays, from both established and new scholars working in the fields of British, Irish and comparative cultural studies, addresses broad questions raised by the interface between language, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in relation to marginal identities, but also includes specific genre-based case studies on contemporary poetry, fiction, drama, popular music and art. This format recognises the importance of specific concerns which emerge from different geographical locations, but also encourages movement beyond traditional formations of national cultures.

Responding to recent constitutional developments in Great Britain and Ireland, it explores their implications both for the cultural negotiations of marginality and for established critical paradigms. It is therefore of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics working in the areas of comparative literature, postcolonial theory, Irish, Scottish and Welsh studies, and British political/cultural studies.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2002

About the author

Glenda Norquay is Emeritus Professor of Scottish Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She completed a Ph.D. thesis on Calvinism and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh and was an assistant editor and contributor to the Scottish international literature, arts and affairs magazine, Cencrastus. She has researched the work of Robin Jenkins and Muriel Spark.

Her research focuses on two areas: Scottish writing, specifically women's fiction, the nineteenth-century and contemporary novel; and Robert Louis Stevenson's fiction, criticism and publishing history. She is editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women's Writing (2012). Her books include Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading (2007) and Robet Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s (2020).