Postgraduate research opportunities SGSAH CDA Project - Archiving Agnes Owens: Asserting the Marginal Voice

Project Overview

Alasdair Gray has described Agnes Owens as ‘the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors’. While her work has widely been acknowledged as culturally and artistically important (she appears, for example, in Calum Colvin’s famous painting of the ‘The Kelvingrove Eight’), there is a lack of supporting materials for in-depth study of her writings. Owens, however, was a prolific writer and had extensive correspondence with fellow writers Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray, in which they often commented on and mutually supported each other’s work. At times they also published together (Lean Tales (1985)). Coming from a West of Scotland working-class background, and as a mother of seven children, Owens only began her writing career in her early fifties and continually shunned any literary limelight. Her literary project was taken up with the same forms of marginalisation. Douglas Gifford described her characters as ‘outsiders, down-and-outs... and no-hopers', and as such, they were always imagined through all of the labours of living: as one belonging to a family (or not), as a worker, or a friend, an alienated subject, or simply a body in need of sustenance; a mind in need of distraction. Drawing on her archives recently donated to the Alasdair Gray Archive (AGA), this will be the first study of the complete writings of Agnes Owens, restoring the importance of her literature of the marginalised, within its West of Scotland setting, to Scottish literary culture, and beyond.

The PhD will focus on three key areas

1. Archiving the papers of Agnes Owens- working with the AGA to organise and catalogue the recently donated papers. This will include preparing a chronological study of her works, incorporating the previously unseen, unpublished works.

2. A detailed study of the broader context of Owen’s work. This section will situate Owens’ work within her broader West of Scotland context. This will include a study of the correspondence and collective textual editing between Agnes Owens, Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray. To what extent was the writing of Agnes Owens influenced by other Scottish writers? In turn, to what extent did she influence their work? This section will also focus on the working-class context of Owens’ work, as well as the broader networks she was operating within (involvement in writers’ groups and literary magazines).

3. Formal study of her literary works. A central theme running through Owens’ work is marginalisation: her texts illuminate outsider figures who, because of their status, reveal absurdities in our social relations, our psychology, and our value systems. This project will offer a sustained critical analysis of Owens’ entire oeuvre through the lens of the marginalised and alienated subject (from the writer, through the narrator and poetic voice, to characters).

Methodologies

In order to deepen understanding of the context of Owens’ work, a central aspect of the project will be to build upon the existing archival materials through the addition of a strand of oral history interviews (with fellow writers, friends and family members). Many of Owens’ short stories first appeared in small literary magazines and writers’ group publications. She was first ‘discovered’ by Liz Lochhead when she tutored at her writers’ group in the Vale of Leven. These interconnections will be further explored through interviewing magazine editors and writers’ group participants/ organisers. Opening out the cultural and historical context of Owens’ work in this way will also be vital to understanding the broader literary and cultural context of Scotland at this time. Many of the interviewees are elderly and there is an urgency and time-sensitivity to this project. The interview recordings and transcriptions will be stored jointly between the AGA and the Scottish Oral History Centre (SOHC) at Strathclyde, where they will be publicly available resources.

One of the main contexts of the thesis will be a sustained critical analysis of marginalisation and alienated subjectivities throughout Owens’ work. This will involve comparative studies of Owens’ narrative strategies in different works, forms, and periods: focussing on formal features like ironic distance, frame narratives, implied audiences, blind-spots, and black humour. This will place Owens’ work in its wider literary historical context and extend critical appreciation of late-20th-century working-class experimentalism in Scottish literature and the arts more broadly.

Further information

The student will be based at the University of Strathclyde, though will have access to research facilities and networks at the University of Glasgow.

At the AGA the student will receive hands-on training from Dallas in working with material objects and archives, online and physical exhibition design and development, and outreach activities working with local communities. This training will focus on best practice for handling archives, ethics of material use and data protection.

In addition, the student will benefit from extensive oral history training from the Scottish Oral History Centre at Strathclyde (SOHC). Through SOHC, and its strong research culture within the School, they will have access to on-going formal training in oral history theory and methodology.