Dr. Margery Palmer McCulloch: From Orkney to Prague

„From Orkney to Prague: Edwin Muir and the ‚Single, Disunited World‘ of Twentieth-Century Europe“

Dr. Margery Palmer McCulloch  (University of Glasgow)

Born into the agricultural, non-industrialised community of the Orkney Isles in 1887, Edwin Muir suffered a traumatic emigration to industrialised Glasgow. After very hard beginnings he has made a considerable contribution to European and Anglophone modern writing as a poet and also as the first English-language translator, with his wife Willa, of the works of Franz Kafka. This lecture will explore the social and political tensions of the modern age through Muir’s use of Orkney as a touchstone of the life-giving community in his writing, together with his positive experience of the recovered self-determination of the people of Prague in the early 1920s. Set against such ‘utopian’ experiences will be Muir’s response to the slums and broken communities of industrialised Glasgow in the early twentieth century, and the greatly altered situation of Prague in the late 1940s. These insights are still of much relevance to our own times.