Cairns Craig

Robert Cairns Craig, OBE, FRSE, FBA (born 16 February 1949) is a Scottish literary scholar, specialising in Scottish and modernist literature. He has been Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen since 2005. Before that, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, serving as Head of the English Literature Department from 1997 to 2003. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005.

He was awarded a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1978 for his thesis "W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and the associationist aesthetic".

He has published on authors including WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Iain Banks.

His 1984 book on Yeats, Eliot, and Pound was described by Seamus Deane as lacking a little clarity, panache and focus, but offering an "engrossing" exploration of the relationship between modernism and reactionary politics, which he links via memory, and particularly Archibald Alison's theory of associationism; Deane called it "a complicated story, illustrated by Craig with such well-chosen and well-timed quotations that it is difficult to resist."

In 1991 he wrote "Rooms without a view", an influential article attacking "heritage film".

The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (1999) brought a "modern, inclusive, skeptical intelligence" to the question of Scottish literature.

He was general editor of the four-volume series History of Scottish Literature (published 1987-89).

He has also been involved as editor or publisher with magazines including Cencrastus and Edinburgh Review.

• Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1982)
• General editor, History of Scottish Literature (1987–89)
• Out of History : Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (1996)
• The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh UP, 1999)
• Iain Banks's Complicity: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2002)
• Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos (2007)
• Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh UP, 2009).
• The Wealth Of The Nation: Scotland, Culture And Independence (2018)

• 2003: Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)
• 2005: Fellow of the British Academy (FBA)
• 2007: Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)