Abstract
The year 2014 marked the eightieth birthday of Alasdair Gray, “one of Scotland’s foremost writers and now widely seen as the grand old man behind the recent Scottish literary and cultural revival”1 (Dietmar Böhnke, l). The time span of Gray’s work has seen many changes in both the cultural and political identity of Scotland, such as the Scottish parliament gaining independence from London (1999), as well as a great rise in the success (both literary and commercial) of the country’s younger writers, including James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and A. L. Kennedy, to name but a few. This chapter hopes to contribute towards rereading the canon by revisiting one of Gray’s most famous novels, Lanark (1981) just over thirty years after its first publication, in order to investigate Gray’s postmodern experimental techniques from a twenty-first century perspective and to consider Lanark in light of developments within critical and theoretical approaches to postmodernism.
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© 2014 Claire Alien
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Allen, C. (2014). Beyond Postmodernism in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. In: Allen, N., Simmons, D. (eds) Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366016_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366016_15
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