David Kinloch Author Critic Scholar Creativing Writing Scottish Literature

Academic Texts

Une Nouvelle Alliance academic text book by David Kinloch cover image Une Nouvelle Alliance: influences francophones sur la litterature ecossaise moderne, edited by David Kinloch and Richard Price. Available to purchase online from Le Comptoir des presses d'universités.

The "Auld Alliance", cultural and military alliance between France and Scotland, is known as one of the oldest in the world, and recent research has shown the reciprocal influences of two cultures during the period of Enlightenment. Does this tradition continue into the 20th century? That is the question which a dozen British and French experts are trying to answer in this book, exploring how writers and translators of this century Scottish fed on French and Francophone literature.

The Thought and Art of Joseph Joubert 1754-1824 by David Kinloch. Available to purchase online from Amazon.

This book rescues Joubert from the ranks of minor French moralistes, and, by tracing the development of his thought from his time as secretary to Diderot through to the period of his association with Chateaubriand, demonstrates that he was a writer on aesthetics of considerable sensitivity. Examination of his manuscripts and of his annotation to books in his library shows that Joubert's primary concern, during the period that witnessed the gradual but profound change from the intellectual values of the Enlightenment to those of the Romantic period, was to establish the status and nature of art and poetry. Reading widely among philosophers and poets from Plato and Homer to Kant and André Chénier, Joubert consigned his thoughts and perceptions to a series of carnets which form the basis of this study and bear witness to an unusually eclectic and enquiring mind. Joubert's significance is not confined to the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is unique among writers of his day in the way that his own interrogation of the very act of writing anticipates the aesthetic of later, highly influential writers such as Mallarmé.

4 Carnets de Joseph Joubert, edited by David Kinloch and Philippe Mangeot (Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, 1992). Available to purchase online from Amazon.

This book examines the issue of Joubert's (1754-1824) modernity and argues that attempts to systematize his thought and turn him into the author of a definable Romantic aesthetic betray his true status as a writer whose existence is solely constituted by the physical dimensions of the manuscripts of the Carnets. Study of the manuscripts suggests that one of Joubert's principal discoveries was that meaning is the product of fruitful encounters between readers and writers and led to his reluctance to publish a book of his own.

Reading Douglas Dunn, edited by David Kinloch and Robert Crawford (Modern Scottish Writers). Available to purchase online from Amazon.

This book presents a critical analysis of the poems, short stories and plays of Douglas Dunn. It also surveys Dunn's life - his friendship with Philip Larkin, his time spent in the USA and his growing political beliefs. A bibliography is included. Contributors to the book include the poets Glyn Maxwell, Sean O'Brien, Bernard O'Donogue and Dave Smith. "Reading Douglas Dunn" should be of interest to students of poetry, contemporary literature and Scottish literature from secondary level upwards, and to teachers and general readers.

Situating Mallarmé, edited by David Kinloch and Gordon Millan. Available to purchase online from Amazon.

Since his death just over a century ago, Stéphane Mallarmé has become a major figure in world literature. Over this period, Mallarmé criticism has tended to concentrate on two aspects of his work. Firstly on textual analysis in order to tackle the difficulty of his writing and secondly, thanks to the interest shown in him by figures such as Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva and Lacan, on his theoretical writings. Indeed, this particular part of his oeuvre has somewhat dominated Mallarmé studies in the last thirty years. This book adopts a new approach by attempting to contextualise Mallarmé's creative writing in terms of his relationships with other art forms, other writers and indeed other cultures. At the same time one of his own key obsessions with death is also reassessed, as is his relationship to the society of his time. Mallarmé's ambitious project was to exploit the potential of dance, music and painting as well as poetry in order to produce an artistic monument for the modern post-industrial age. Experts from all of these fields have therefore combined with literary specialists in order to adopt an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to Mallarmé's work which marks a bold and exciting new departure in Mallarmé studies.

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