Overview

Alasdair Gray (19342019) 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 ran Mr 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.

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Author:   Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon (Professor of British Literature, Aix-Marseille Université (AMU), France) ,  Camille Manfredi (Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Western Brittany) ,  Kirsten Stirling (Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Lausanne)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399551373

ISBN 10:   139955137
Pages:   360
Publication Date:   31 May 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Language:   English

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of illustrations 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: Narratives of Normalcy and Body-Minded Non-Normativity between Emphatic Thinking and Constructive Critique 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

Reviews

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. -- Glenda Norquay, Liverpool John Moores University

Author Information

Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon is Professor of British Literature at Aix-Marseille Université (AMU). Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Scottish fiction. She is the author of The Space of Fiction: Voices from Scotland in a Post-devolution Age (2015), Alasdair Gray: Marges et Effets de Miroirs (2004) and has contributed a chapter to Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds, ed. Camille Manfredi (2014). She is also the editor of Women and Scotland: Literature, Culture, Politics (2020) and, with Camille Manfredi and Scott Hames, of Scottish Writing after the Devolution: Edges of the New (2022). Camille Manfredi is Professor of Scottish literature at the University of Western Brittany. She is the author of Alasdair Gray: le faiseur d’Ecosse (2012) and Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art (2019), editor of Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds (2014), and co-editor, with Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon and Scott Hames, of Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New (2022). Kirsten Stirling is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Scottish literature and early modern poetry. She is the author of Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text (2008), Peter Pan’s Shadows in the Literary Imagination (2012) and Picturing Divinity in John Donne’s Writings (2024) as well as several edited collections.

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