The Collected Works of Kenneth White

Three collections of essays whose aim is to express the cartography and the experience of a live, open world If Kenneth White was keenly interested in early twentieth-century attempts to rescue his home territory, Scotland, from a heavy heritage of historicism, doldrums, flat realism (and its cousin, fantasticality), right from the start he was out for something more radically grounded, more intellectually incisive and culturally more coherent. The three books gathered here illustrate his initial movement on these lines in all its aspects, from politics to poetics. On Scottish Ground reveals the terrain to be explored, from geology and archaeology up, resituating figures such as David Hume, Patrick Geddes, Hugh MacDiarmid, as well as revisiting the works of scotic thinkers such as Duns Scotus and John Scot Erigena. Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath takes the exploration further. The word "wrath" here, taken by many to mean "anger", in fact goes back to the old Norse word signifying "turning point". White's turning point is not only geographical, it is fundamental. The third book, The Wanderer and his Charts, lays out the co-ordinates of the new space White has opened up. He may have left Scotland, but he has taken with him a lot of what we might call a quintessential Scotland, just as Joyce took with him an essential Ireland. Kenneth White is not only a convinced European Scot, but he renews the tradition of the medieval Scotus vagans ('wandering Scot'), an existence devoted to travelling and learning, finding and founding. After much moving about, he taught (1983-96) from a specially created Chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne. In 1989, he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics, the aim of which is to explore in depth the human and non-human habitation of the earth and the basis of live culture. On the Continent, his work, whether in essay, narrative or poem, has been awarded many prizes, among them the Prix Medicis Etranger and the French Academy's Grand Prix du Rayonnement.