Book description
In a work of spectacular imagination and remarkable synthesis, poet
Robert Crawford celebrates St Andrews, the first town in the world to
have its people, buildings and natural environment thoroughly
documented through photography. The Beginning and the End of the World
tells the stories of several pioneering Scottish photographers,
linking their work to one of the nineteenth century's most scandalous
and hotly debated publications. Here is the extraordinary intellectual
life of an eccentric society rich in apocalyptically-minded Victorian
inventors and authors whose work has had an international impact. The
protagonists include a very quarrelsome professor, a cello-playing
ex-military golfer, a notorious scientist, a married couple coping
with mental breakdown and a physician obsessed with sewage. In paying
full attention to these people's inter-relationship, implicitly and
explicitly this book suggests that their lasting legacies may have a
bearing on our own arguments about environmental sustainability and
the possibility of largescale extinction.
Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St
Andrews University. He received his MA from Glasgow University and his
DPhil from Oxford. He is a founding Fellow of the English Association
and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has taught at the
universities of Oxford and Glasgow, and has been at St Andrews since
1989.
