Culture City: Imagining Glasgow

'Culture City: Imagining Glasgow' is a critical study of Glasgow novels from the eighteenth- century to the present day. It is the first full-scale attempt to identify and elucidate the dominant tropes, forms and discourses deployed in fiction written about Glasgow. The project examines a range of Glasgow texts, looking at the different ways the city is imagined, and at the formal methods adopted in writing about the city. The project explores such topics as: the novel as an urban form; the position of the artist in industrial society; narrative technique and the treatment of vermicular language; stereotypes and the changing image of Glasgow.
The project examines the dominant representations of Glasgow- as 'Second City of the Empire', 'Red Clydeside', 'City of Culture' and so forth - with the aim, not of testing the sociological validity of these representations but of assessing their aesthetic currency and function. In so doing, the project throws light on the 'imagined community' of a city whose journey from industrial powerhouse through post-industrial waste ground to heritage museum carries enormous resonance for many other cities. It also increases our understanding of the culture of cities at a period when, for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in urban communities.