Essays

The Wanderer and his Charts

Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty

Essays on Cultural Renewal

The Book

2004

Essays
21,6 x 13,8 cm
256 pages
Paperback
ISBN10: 9781904598152
Polygon, Edinburgh / Birlinn General

Following on from On Scottish Ground, this book moves further into White’s mental cartography. A first part, ‘The Intellectual Nomad’, lays out the practice of intellectual nomadism, based on White’s explorations and researches from culture to culture across the world. A second part, ‘Place and Space’, gathers together essays written in the environment of a mountain and frontier country (the Pyrénées), and in a coastal area (North Brittany): it concerns what White calls ‘geopoetics’, a theory that attempts to get back into the root of culture and start again afresh. In the third part, ‘A Cultural Project’, White turns his attention specifically to Scotland with propositions for radical cultural renewal. In White’s hands, the essay is no mere literary plaything or impressionistic rambling, it is a vehicle of fast cogent thinking. The sheer scope of the information and the clarity of the arguments are hard to find anywhere else.

Publisher’s presentation