Autorentext

Tasha Alden is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British Fiction at Aberystwyth University, UK. She has written on a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, and her research interests include medical humanities, ethics and empathy, the historical novel, literature and theology, and queer writing.

Fiona Tolan is Reader in Contemporary Women's Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is author of The Fiction of Margaret Atwood (2023) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism (with Rachel Carroll; 2024).

Klappentext

Jackie Kay: Critical Essays offers the first full-length critical study of Kay's work. It brings together a range of essays by international scholars to examine the work of a writer who has expanded the scope of British literature.

Jackie Kay is the author of 30 works, including plays, poetry, prose, children's literature, and short stories. She was the Scots Makar (the national poet) from 2016-2021 and has won or been shortlisted for over 20 literary awards and prizes. This collection addresses the full range of Kay's writing, from her earliest poetry and fiction of the 1980s through to her most recent publications, including her lesser-examined works such as her dramas and her writing for children. Significant themes and concerns, including race, national identity, family and life writing, gender and sexuality, are all examined in new critical essays that greatly expand understanding of Kay's canon. The contributors show that Kay's work is remarkable for its range of genres, its consistent reinvention of forms, and its marriage of intimate, domestic depictions of individual lives with broad political and philosophical themes.

This book is aimed at students and scholars of contemporary British fiction, Black British literature, Scottish literature, and contemporary women's writing.

Inhalt

Foreword: Full Fig - Jackie Kay; Introduction - Tasha Alden and Fiona Tolan; 1. Opening Out: Jackie Kay's Many Voices - Nancy K. Gish; 2. From Great White Mothers to Black Sisters: Jackie Kay, Feminism and the 1980s -Fiona Tolan; 3. "The Presence that Absence Makes": the Aesthetic of the Secret in Jackie Kay's Trumpet - C.J. Griffin; 4. Stacy Ann Creech and Karen Sands-O'Connor, '"My Face is a Map": Place, Truth, and Belonging in Jackie Kay's Children's Books'; 5. Liminality and Intimacy in Jackie Kay's Wish I Was Here - Ana Garcia-Soriano; 6. Diversifying Modes of National Identity in Jackie Kay's Fiere - Tara Brusselaers and Elisabeth Bekers; 7. A Museum of Voices: Ekphrastic Encounters in the Poetry of Jackie Kay - Lourdes López-Ropero; 8. Jackie Kay's Monumental Poetics - Deirdre Osborne; 9. The Romance of Scottish Communism: Politics and the Family in Jackie Kay's May Day' - Peter Ely; Index