The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics(New Perspectives in Ontology)

About the Book

Examining Hamish Henderson's search for the radical voice of the people in modern Scotland
How might the alienation of the artist in modern Scotland be overcome? How do you incite a popular folk revival? Can a poet truly speak with the 'voice of the people'? And what happens to the writer who rejects print culture in favour of becoming Anon.? The life and times of polymath, scholar, author and folk-hero, Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), poses, and helps us to answer, these questions. This book examines his life-long commitment to finding a form of artistic expression suitable for post-war Europe. Though Henderson is a major figure in Scottish cultural history, his reputation is largely maintained through anecdotes and radical folk songs. This study explores his ideas in their intellectual, cultural and political contexts. It describes how all of his works in war poetry, song collection, folklore scholarship, folksong revivalism, literary translation, and vicious public debates reflect this desire to see the artist fully reintegrated in society.
Key Features:

Reclaims Hamish Henderson from the marginalia of Scottish literary historyProvides a hitherto unexplored perspective on twentieth-century Scottish cultural historySituates Scottish literary and cultural debates in the broader context of intellectual and cultural developments in twentieth-century Europe and the USDirectly tackles the question of national identity in twentieth-century Scotland

Table of Contents:
Contents; Acknowledgements; Contents; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Chapter One: The Flytings, Chapter Two: War Poetry and Soldiers’ Songs; Chapter Three: Gramsci’s Folklore; Chapter Four: Poetry and the People; Chapter Five: The Revivalist and the Folklorist; Epilogue; Index.

About the Author :
Corey Gibson is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Originally from Dumfries and Galloway, he was awarded his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2012. His work on Hamish Henderson earned him the Ross Roy Medal for excellence in Scottish Literary Research. And in 2013, he was the US-UK Fulbright Commission Scottish Studies Scholar, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Review :
‘This intellectually rigorous and stimulating book is unique, important, and ground breaking.’ This intellectually rigorous and stimulating book is unique, important, and ground breaking. Gibson's intention is admirable and the outcome is impressive. This is the most scholarly comprehensive assessment of Henderson's work as a poet, songwriter, cultural agent, protector and provocateur. Gibson's intention is admirable and the outcome is impressive. This is the most scholarly comprehensive assessment of Henderson's work as a poet, songwriter, cultural agent, protector and provocateur. ‘the first critical monograph on the work of Hamish Henderson and its role in the 'cultural politics' of Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century, based nearly entirely on Henderson's writings, rather than the larger-than-life character of 'Hamish Mòr', the fondly remembered if sometimes slightly dishevelled 'father of the Scottish Folk Revival' and his legendary 'impromptu colloquia' in Sandy Bell's Bar… Corey Gibson shows him in all his dialectic tensions — of poet and songwriter, between oral and written traditions, as folklore scholar and folk revivalist, in the one role charting and analysing the folk revival while, in the other, simultaneously intervening in it, as a creative contributor and tireless promoter.’ The book is a bold statement. It is the benchmark further research on Hamish Henderson will be measured by. There is Henderson’s archive, now curated by the University of Edinburgh Library, with (among other items) Henderson’s notebooks and more than 10,000 letters. The acquisition of the archive in 2013 came too late for Gibson’s work on his thesis, but it is hoped that he and others will build on and further develop the concepts, ideas and theses put forward in this important and stimulating contribution to the debates anent the contemporary cultural history of Scotland. In his excellent book [...] Corey Gibson writes of the complex friendship and contested territories between Henderson and MacDiarmid. In this acute, sympathetic, trenchant book, Henderson emerges as both a crucial figure in Scottish cultural politics and an internationally resonant intellectual. Modernist poet, folk revivalist, cultural collector, polemicist, impresario, thinker, comrade: Henderson contained multitudes. Gibson brilliantly tracks his multiple commitments and makes a strong case for him as a theorist and not only a collector of 'culture'. Henderson and his work have long been due a rich and full appraisal: here it is.