• A photograph of green flatbed trucks with blue flashing lights attached parading down the street. In the truck beds are Taliban members - men in combat fatigues, some with flags and guns, some with hats, headscarves or sunglasses. THe mood is celebratory, with one or two in the closest vehicle smiling for the camera. Photograph: Callum Darragh. Source: Flikr via Wikipedia (public domain).

CounterText 8.1 – The Mimetic Condition

The articles in this special issue offer powerful transdisciplinary testimony to the rich potential of the contemporary return to mimesis, and in doing so suggest ways in which the mimetic turn and the post-literary turn may be understood as critically supplementing each other. In this short accompanying video Guest Editor Nidesh Lawtoo offers a foretaste of what readers can expect.

Stands Scottish Literature Where It Did? Revisiting Devolution

It’s been fifteen years since the last fat volume of essays on contemporary Scottish writing. Only a blink of historical time, but it’s been quite an eventful period. When the chapters of Berthold Schoene’s brilliant Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature were being written, both the country and its debates looked rather different.