GLAM Members Meeting, Hull History Centre, 6Th October 2017
GLAM Members Meeting, Hull History Centre, 6th October 2017
How to get to the Hull History Centre:
11:45 / Arrivals12:00 / Introduction from the Chair / Rachel Foss
12:05 / Key Note: Hull City of Culture and the History Centre Literary collections / Simon Wilson – Hull History Centre
12:45 / The politics of location worldwide / David Sutton – Diasporic Literary Archives Network
1:05 / Lunch break
1:55 / The Mersey Sound: 50 years of the Liverpool Poets
The three voices of Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough lent a peculiarly Liverpudlian twist to post-war poetics. As fresh, exciting and irreverent as the decade itself, the 1967 Mersey Sound anthology “brought poetry down from the dusty shelf and onto the street”, and went on to become the one of the bestselling poetry collections of all time. The paper will consider how the archives of the Liverpool Poets demonstrate these enduring links between poetry and place. / Jenny Higham – University of Liverpool
2:15 / Lost City? J.B. Priestley’s Bradford
The paper will explore J.B. Priestley’s complex relationship with his home city, setting of many of his most famous works, and how this affects Special Collections and his archive. / Alison Cullingford – University of Bradford
2:35 / The Community Drama of George Mackay Brown
George Mackay Brown’s work for the theatre has attracted surprisingly little critical or public attention. Today he is almost exclusively recognized as a writer of verse and fiction, yet is known to have written over fifty plays. Although only five were published in his lifetime, a further ten were performed at Orkney’s St Magnus Festival between 1981 and 1992. Edinburgh University Library’s George Mackay Brown Archive (GB 237 Coll-50) contains manuscripts for thirty-four of Brown’s plays, covering a forty-year time span. They consist primarily of hand-written texts, and include both fair copies and drafts written on an astounding variety of media, ranging from cheque stubs through royalty statements to issues of the Radio Times. In this talk, I shall argue that these manuscripts can lead to a new understanding of how Brown perceived his role as a writer working within a community. It is a critical commonplace to view Brown’s work as synonymous with his Orkney homeland, yet the picture that often emerges of Brown is of an isolated Romantic bard, railing against the encroachments of modernity. His theatrical works, however, not only commemorate local traditions and festivities, but are designed to be performed by community groups including school-children. An appreciation of the community-focussed nature of Brown’s drama not only challenges perceptions of Brown as a prophet in the wilderness, but may help to counter criticism that has been levelled at Brown’s published plays. Brown has been accused of imbuing his characters with a ‘statuesque’ or ‘inert’ nature and neglecting the requirements of the professional stage. Critics have lamented an over-abundance of ‘speaking parts’ that leaves no room any one actor to develop a performance. I shall argue, conversely, that Brown’s apparently ‘elementary’ stagecraft is to be understood within the context of a community project, in which untrained players, often children, relate their own island chronicle. / Paul Barnaby – University of Edinburgh
2:55 / Mapping Glasgow
"Glasgow is a magnificent city," said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" "Because nobody imagines living here," said Thaw. (Alasdair Gray, Lanark, 1981)
This paper will draw on the papers of the poet Edwin Morgan, the writer and artist Alasdair Gray, and the critic Philip Hobsbaum (convenor of the Glasgow Group) to examine depictions of the city’s spaces across time. / Sam Maddra – University of Glasgow
3:20 / Tea/coffee break (refreshments can be purchased at the Centre)
3:40 / GLAM Business meeting
4:10 / Close