The Edinburgh Companion to Alasdair Gray and the Arts
Edited by Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon, Camille Manfredi, Kirsten Stirling
A comprehensive and cutting-edge guide to Alasdair Gray’s literary and artistic practice
- Provides new insight into Gray’s working practices by including contributions by artists/collaborators
- Provides a historicised view of Gray’s output while taking into account recent critical developments
- Offers extended discussions of Gray’s visual art as well as his literary works
Alasdair Gray (1934–2019) is widely recognised as a key figure in Scottish literature and culture. His work reached a new audience in 2024 due to the release of the Oscar-nominated adaptation of his novel Poor Things. In the wake of this recent attention, The Edinburgh Companion to Alasdair Gray and the Arts interrogates both Gray’s literary and visual artistic practice as well as, crucially, facilitating conversation between these forms. With chapters on his prefatory spaces, his depictions of women, his complex relationship to empire and his role as a public intellectual, it provides a historicised view of Gray’s output while also introducing fresh critical approaches. The accounts of Gray’s visual art gathered here provide new insights into his collaborative projects, including his work with fellow artists and assistants on large-scale murals like Òran Mór and the Hillhead Subway commission, as well as his mobilisation of exhibitions not only for himself but in support of contemporary and more junior artists. Featuring contributions from prominent authors, academics, artists, politicians and curators, this Companion explores Gray’s political commitments and artistic partnerships to understand how his work has been remade and reincarnated, particularly in transmedial ways.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: On What Led to Alasdair Gray and the Arts
Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon, Camille Manfredi and Kirsten Stirling
Part I: Alasdair Gray, Politics and Community
1. Man of Independent Mind: Alasdair Gray and the Scottish Constitutional Question
Eilidh Whiteford
2. ‘The matter of Scotland’: Alasdair Gray and Hugh MacDiarmid
Scott Lyall
3. ‘One Great Soul or Mind or Force’: Alasdair Gray and Empire
Joseph H. Jackson
4. Alasdair Gray as a Public Intellectual
Carla Sassi
5. The Coherent Panopticon: Seeing Things from Every Side and Firmly Drawing a Line
Alan Riach
6. ‘Mirrors reflecting mirrors’: Gray Writing Women, Writing Men
Kirsten Stirling
7. Alasdair Gray’s Disability Imagination
Arianna Introna
8. Taoism and Sociopolitical Allegories in Alasdair Gray’s Short Stories
Ning He and Hongling Lyu
Part II: Alasdair Gray in Collaboration
9. The Working Practices of Alasdair Gray
Nichol Wheatley
10. Alasdair Gray and the Art of the Creative Response: From ‘The Star’ to ‘The Crystal Egg’ and Back, Across Visual and Literary Practice
Rodge Glass
11. ‘their talk of poetry / how I should write my own’: Alasdair Gray’s Englishing of Dante
Daragh O’Connell
12. How Lanark Ends
John Purser
13. Alasdair Gray and the Art of Prefaces
Camille Manfredi and Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon
14. Word-Image Relationships: Alasdair Gray’s Shades of White, Iconotextuality and Beyond
Anthony Remy
15. ‘My instinctive decisions are also conscious ones’: The Typography and Lettering of Alasdair Gray, from Micro to Monumental
Edwin Pickstone
Part III: Mediating and Adapting Alasdair Gray
16. The Exhibitions of Alasdair Gray
Jenny Brownrigg
17. Fictio and Facta: Alasdair Gray’s Spatial Performativity
Federica Giardino
18. From Print to Pixel: Poor Things: A Novel Guide and the Digital Reinterpretation of Alasdair Gray’s Novel Forms
Rachel Loughran
19. Adapting Poor Things for the Screen
Duncan Petrie
20. Building a Legacy through The Alasdair Gray Archive
Sorcha Dallas
21. Adapting Lanark for the stage
David Greig
Notes on Contributors
Index
This collection of essays pays full tribute to Alasdair Gray as one of Scotland’s most important creative forces. Bringing together sharp critical analyses of his writing, thoughtful interpretations of his visual works, new readings of his politics, and the voices of those who worked with him, it maps the interactions of text, images and ideas that characterised a career of inimitable productivity. By structuring the volume around his engagement with politics and community, his collaborations, and adaptions of his work, the editors highlight the importance of Gray’s literary and political interventions, his intellectual generosity, and the nature of his influence on the arts in Scotland and beyond. These ‘likely and unlikely’ stories are underpinned by substantial archival research and brilliantly supported by illustrations illuminating both his life and his importance as a visual artist. The collection offers new perspectives on Gray’s biography, his working practices, and his impact not only on other writers and artists but on a country shaping a sense of itself. In the process the book remains faithful to the unique combination of lively mischief and intellectual commitment that made Alasdair Gray an imaginative iconoclast of international importance.
