Scottish Magazines Network
I lead the Scottish Magazines Network, an AHRC research network partnered with the National Library of Scotland (CI: Malcolm Petrie, St Andrews). The network brings together scholars of Scottish literature, history, politics and publishing to explore — and ‘re-circulate’ — independent magazine culture of the post-1960s period.
Through its events, podcasts, blogs and publications — including the showcase magazine FLYTE — we aim to stimulate new public interest in these cultural and political magazines, and their role in shaping the Scotland of today. An edited volume co-edited with Eleanor Bell and Malcom Petrie is in preparation.
For further details, see the project website or @ScotMagsNet.
FLYTE: a magazine showcasing the network’s activity and profiling four key titles.
Also available as a printed magazine.
CONTEXT
Sparked by Scottish International in 1968, a range of independent magazines played a major creative role in Scottish literature, culture and politics over the next three decades.
Writing in Radical Scotland in 1983, George Kerevan noted that
‘politics is no longer confined to the Establishment and Labourist agenda of economic tinkering. Cultural values represent a new Second Front’.
The arena of this ‘second front’ was established – and gradually expanded – by titles such as New Edinburgh Review (from 1969), Chapman (1970), Crann-Tàra (1977), MsPrint (1978) and Cencrastus (1979).
By the 1980s, these magazines had significant influence on the ‘first’ front – the field of electoral politics – in yoking together assertions of Scottish cultural identity and demands for constitutional change.
Looking back, we can see post-1960s magazine culture as the laboratory in which the discourse and identity of the ‘new’ Scotland was experimentally debated, strategised and disseminated.