Scottish Magazines Network: New Research Directions and Partnerships

Sparked by Scottish International (Review) in 1968, a range of small independent magazines played a major creative role in Scottish literature, culture and politics over the next three decades. Fostered by the Scottish Arts Council, these titles featured (publicly subsidised) poetry and short fiction, and were the key venue in which writers, journalists and campaigners developed a shared agenda centred on Scottish cultural difference, literary revival and democratic dissent.

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.

These titles were also key sites of literary innovation, featuring work by every major and emerging Scottish poet of the period (Maclean, Morgan, Leonard, Lochhead, Jamie), short fiction by James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Iain Crichton Smith, and many others, and even the watershed of the modern Scottish novel, Alasdair Gray's Lanark. The same titles featured key essays and critical interventions by thinkers such as Tom Nairn, Isobel Lindsay and George E.

Davie, influential debates on the marginalisation of women's writing, and were a key venue for the reassertion of Scottish folk traditions and the importance of Gaelic and Scots. Constant crossover between literary, cultural and electoral debate - from page to page and within the same article - is central to the interest and influence of these titles.

To the extent that an earlier process of 'cultural devolution' paved the way for the new Scottish parliament in 1999, it can be directly witnessed in the writing, criticism and artwork of these magazines, and in the interpretive communities and political alliances which were formed around and through them.

The study and re-discovery of these magazines matters: first, because they are the 'missing link' in recent scholarship on Scottish culture and politics, the neglected arena in which movements for literary identity and democratic renewal intersect and interact. These magazines also answer the strong public appetite to understand the cultural and intellectual strands that helped to form today's Scotland.

They had far-reaching impact in post-1960s Scottish literature, politics and cultural life, but they are seriously overlooked in histories and literary studies of the period. To address these needs, our network brings together four key groups: - academic researchers (working in Scottish history, literature, politics, publishing)

- editors, contributors, and readers of our target magazines - students, media and members of the public curious about Scotland's recent magazine heritage - experts in restoring comparable magazines to public life through digitisation

The network will establish the resources and frameworks necessary to put these magazines firmly back on the map, potentially via a future digitisation programme (in partnership with the National Library of Scotland). Through our publications (including a taster 'megazine' reproducing the content and design of our target titles), we will boost the profile of these materials, stimulate new research directions, and consolidate the research field.

Everyone interested in the intersection of cultural and political developments in recent Scottish history will benefit from this research and these resources.