This innovative collection of essays is focused on the idea of transmedialization: the ways that the traditional forms of the predominantly oral cultures of Scotland and Brittany (poetry, song and story) can be transformed by the use of hybrid forms and new digital technologies.
The volume invites readers from a range of disciplines - music, art, literature, history, cultural memory studies, anthropology or media studies - to consider how an intermedial aesthetics of the edge can enable these distinctive cultures to thrive. The languages of both cultures are presently endangered and the essays seek to connect notions of language with a culture which can align its traditions with the concerns of the present day. The collection proceeds from a conceptual analysis of poetry film, peripheral vision and the concerns of peripheral communities to an examination of inventive practices in the film-poem, experimental video, film portrait, word-image, digitised music, sound-image and genre-contestant narratives. The collection also includes contributions from creative practitioners who utilize a range of hybrid forms to revitalize the traditional vernacular cultures of Scotland and Brittany.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, film studies, media studies, music, cultural theory, and philosophy.
Lindsay Blair is Associate Professor of Visual Studies and Cultural Theory at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She is the Principal Investigator of the "Hands Across the Sea" project (https: //handsacrosstheseacom.wordpress.com/). Blair's previous work on word-image and the film poem resulted in a monograph on the American Surrealist, Joseph Cornell, entitled Joseph Cornell's Vision of Spiritual Order. Blair was then engaged by the BBC as Associate Producer for an Omnibus Documentary, Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box. Her recent research which has focused on word and image in the art of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland has been described as "a re- assessment of the tired narratives of Highland visual culture, shifting understanding to more international and contemporary discourses". Examples of published outputs include: "Dalriada, the Lordship of the Isles and the Northern Rim: De-centralising the Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland", Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2017), '"Mutations from Below" The Land Raiders of Reef and An Suileachan by Will Maclean and Marian Leven', Northern Scotland (2020) and "The Photographs of A.B. Ovenstone and the Re-Invention of the Scottish Amateur Tradition", The Journal of Victorian Culture (2023).
Camille Manfredi is Professor of Scottish literature and visual arts at the University of Brest in Western Brittany. Her published work includes the monographs Alasdair Gray: le faiseur d'Ecosse (2012) and Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art (2019), as well as the edited volumes Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds (2014) and Brittany-Scotland: Contacts, Transfers and Dissonances (2017), with Michel Byrne. She is the co-editor, with Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon and Scott Hames, of Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New (2022) in which she contributed a chapter on "Scottish Audio- and Film-Poetry: Writing, Sounding, Imaging Twenty-First-Century Scotland". She is the Co-investigator of the "Hands Across the Sea" project.
