Lanark (Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Alasdair Gray
- First Published: 1981
- Type of Work: Metafictional allegory
- Time of Work: The unspecified present
- Setting: Glasgow and imaginary under- and afterworlds
- Principal Characters: Lanark, Duncan Thaw, Rima, Professor Ozenfant, Marjory Laidlaw, Duncan Thaw, Sr., Sludden
- Genres: Long fiction, Philosophical realism, Fantasy, Metafiction, Dystopian fiction
- Subjects: 1950’s, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Social issues, Other worlds, 1940’s, Fantasy, Imagination, Painting or painters, Health, Adventure, Scotland or Scottish people, Diseases, Hospitals, Horror, Utopias, Interior design, Underworld or Hades
- Locales: Glasgow, Scotland, Spiritual realms
The Novel
Identification of the state with the human organism is, one of the narrators of Lanark tells the reader, a literary device at least as old as Plutarch. In this eccentric, compelling novel by a Scottish writer-painter whose sketches both illustrate and extend the text, the decay of the body politic is the controlling image. Swiftian in its intensity, Lanark is a metafictional allegory. Drawing on sources that range from Vergil to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from William Blake and Ralph Waldo Emerson to contemporary Scottish novelists, Alasdair Gray...
[The entire page is 2197 words long]
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