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What is

ScottishLiterature

Alan RiachVisit the Scottish Writing Exhibitionat the MLA 2008 Annual ConventionBooth 100



1

What is Scottish Literature

A mountainous landscape sensually presented in vivid colours with deep seawater andreshwater lochs long stretches o land orming bays and peninsulas around inlets anatural and ancient world but with a scattering o houses a populated landscape arrom cities but occupied by people and the lives concerns loves and dispositions ogenerations Te painting on the cover is lsquoTe Cuillins Evening April 1964rsquo by JohnCunningham (1926ndash1998) In his own English translation the Gaelic poet SorleyMacLean (1911ndash1996) ends his poem lsquoTe Cuillinrsquo like this

Beyond the lochs o the blood o the children o menbeyond the railty o plain and the labour o mountainbeyond poverty consumption ever agony

beyond hardship wrong tyranny distressbeyond misery despair hatred treacherybeyond guilt and defilement watchulheroic the Cuillin is seenrising on the other side o sorrow

Te poem was written in 1939 at the beginning o the Second World War EvidentlyMacLeanrsquos understanding o the rise o Fascism in Europe was countered by the per-manent symbolic hope represented by the mountain range o his native place He wasborn on the island o Raasay beside Skye and grew up looking over towards thesemountains climbing them as a young man By the twentieth century o course mosto Scotlandrsquos population was living in the cities ndash Glasgow Edinburgh AberdeenDundee ndash and their experience was more generally urban than not So we might begin

with a recognisable image o Scotland as a place o natural beauty and symbolic au-thority but we must deepen our understanding with a sense o the historical complex-ity o S cotlandrsquos national identity beore we can begin to ully encounter the richnesso Scottish literature

lsquoScotlandrsquo is a word that names a particular nation defined by geographical borders

However in the early twenty-first century since the union o the crowns o Scotlandand England in 1603 and the union o the parliaments o Edinburgh and Londonin 1707 this nation exists within the political state o Great Britain and NorthernIreland with its global legacy o British imperialism Tereore it must be imaginedin two different dimensions as part o a political state called the United Kingdomand as a single nation o separate cultural distinction along with other nations in the

worldFor people who live within the borders o this nation certain things will be con-

erred by languages geology climate and weather architectural design terrain currentcultural habits and a history o cultural production that might be different rom suchthings elsewhere Te languages in which most Scottish literature is written ndash GaelicScots and English ndash coner their own rhythms sounds musical dynamics and relations



2 What is Scottish Literature What is Scottish Literature 3

between them coner their own character upon the priorities o expression in speechand writing Geography creates another range o characteristics Growing up in differentcities (ew are as different as Glasgow and Edinburgh) or growing up near the coast in atidal landscape with the sea returning the way it does is different rom growing up in arainorest or a desert Suburbs in New Zealand are different rom suburbs in ScotlandCities have their own characters and specific histories antiquities and modernities

Where did this nation beginOver hal a millennium rom Columbarsquos time in the sixth century through Ken-

neth MacAlpin in the ninth century and Malcolm Canmore in the eleventh centurydifferent groups o people o different languages and cultural preerences got to knowmore about each other and began to live together in a comity o identity Te encir-cling threat by sea rom Norse raiders and rom the south by Anglo-Saxon peoplesbegan to coner a defined position or this multi-aceted identity

Identity is a unction o position and position is a unction o power Te keyqualities inorming the creation o Scotlandrsquos national identity were first a recogni-tion that the nation was made up o different peoples different languages diversitieso terrain and culture and second a recognition o the parameters surrounding thatidentity As the American poet Charles Olson puts it

Limitsare what any o usis inside o

Te Wars o Independence through the thirteenth and ourteenth centuries ledby William Wallace and Robert the Bruce culminated in Brucersquos victory over massedEnglish orces at Bannockburn in 1314 and the reaty o Northampton in 1328 Aconsciousness ndash evident in writing and other orms o expression ndash o what we mightrecognise today as an idea o national identity had been generated strongly by the late1300s John Barbour wrote a historical epic poem about Bruce in the 1370s and inthe late 1400s and early 1500s through the reig ns o James III and James IV great po-etry was written by major figures such as Robert Henryson William Dunbar Gavin

Douglas and Blind Harry (who in the 1470s wrote another epic poem o stories about Wallace) Poets and composers ndash including Scotlandrsquos greatest composer RobertCarver ndash flourished at the magnificently cultured Renaissance court o James IV

In 1603 King James VI o Scotland rode south to London on the death o 983121ueenElizabeth I o England He united the two kingdoms and the court was now centredin London Te moment was a watershed or English literature Te English poetEdmund Spenserrsquos long poem Te Faerie Queen was written in a spirit o religiousdevotion but ormally his writing was becoming passeacute in an age in which theatres

were being built in the capital city Instead o an intricately patterned unity a uniyingstructure envisioned by Spenser the essential thing about the literary orm o the playis the action between separate characters the creation o others and otherness Oneo the reasons or the enduring popularity o Hamlet is its representation o a lonely

individual at its centre And one reason or the greatness o Shakespearersquos later trag-edies ndash especially King Lear ndash is that he lived through the demise o the Elizabethanage and experienced the rise o the Jacobean era and saw what it might portend

In the late 1600s wealthy Scots put their money into a colonial venture in the Car-ibbean at a place called Darien near the isthmus o Panama Tey had seen how the

wind was blowing with Englandrsquos colonial dominions and thought they might buildan empire o their own Te project was disastrous and much o the financial wealth oScotland was lost In 1707 the Scottish parliament voted itsel out o existence and sentdelegates to the London parliament It was partly an attempt to buoy up a precariouseconomy by joining a bigger enterprise Scotland retained sel-determination in its legaland educational systems and church identity but dissolved its political selood Tere

was resistance Te Jacobite risings o 1715 and 1745 were not purely Scottish national-ist but they represented a serious threat to the economy o the newly-created United

Kingdom When Bonnie Prince Charliersquos soldiers approached London the value othe British pound dropped to sixpence Such a threat to the Union prompted a violentresponse and reprisals against the Highlanders were brutal For a time the bagpipesthe kilt and the Gaelic language itsel were intensely oppressed I you were a Gael youmight be punished or playing music wearing normal clothes or simply speaking yourown language So a strange thing happened bagpipes Highland dress and Gaelic be-came symbols o an oppressed culture But since they were actually expressions o thatculture you might say that they became symbols o themselves Tis helped give them atremendously potent orce in later years One exaggeration o that is the extent to whichthey became clicheacutes o Scottish identity instantly recognisable throughout the worldHighland soldiers in kilts were known in twentieth-century World Wars as lsquothe ladiesrom Hellrsquo But the deepening orce o these symbols surviving as it has done throughcenturies o caricature can be heard most clearly in the classical music o the Highlandbagpipe pibroch Hugh MacDiarmid described this music brilliantly

Te bagpipes ndash they are screaming and they are sorrowulTere is a wail in their merriment and cruelty in their triumph

Tey rise and all like a weight swung in the air at the end o a stringHe says that they are lsquolike a human voicersquo ndash then he corrects himsel

No or the human voice liesTey are like human lie that flows under the words

Te paradox was that while Highland identity was subject to colonial oppressionthe long tradition began o successul Scots ndash including Highlanders ndash engaging in thedeveloping British Empire and identiying themselves with it In the nineteenth centuryScotland was widely known as North Britain One o the most ascinating novelists othe period was John Galt whose detailed depiction o the commercial priorities o small-town Scotland and the pathos o the imperial aspiration are moving aspects o Annals othe Parish and Te Entail Scottish identity was internationally recognised in the images




known even today all over the world not only bagpipes and tartan but whisky heatherhaggis wild mountain scenery islands and Highlands While these images largely deriverom exaggerations and caricatures o Highland rural and pastoral lie Scotlandrsquos peo-

ple in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly moving to live in the big industrialcities o Glasgow Dundee and the towns o the Central Belt Tey brought the ideals ocommunity and amily lie into new conditions o urban deprivation

o many Scottish writers and artists the First World War was the culminationo imperialism wo other international events inspired many o them at this timethe Irish rising at Easter 1916 and the Russian socialist revolution o 1917 A Celticnation asserting its independence rom the British state and an assertion o aggres-sively idealist Communism to break down the social divisiveness o the class system

were both or many o Scotlandrsquos people inspirational acts MacDiarmid who hadenlisted in the British Army or the war eager like a whole generation o young men

to march into the apocalypse and be part o what seemed l ike Armageddon said oncethat when he heard o the Irish rebellion he wished it had been possible to get out oBritish uniorm and join the Irish fighting imperialism

In the 1920s a literary and cultural movement heralded a political drive towardsrenewed political as well as cultural sel-determination Te National Party oScotland was ormed in 1928 It was not until 1979 that a reerendum was heldor the population o Scotland to vote or or against devolved political power Amajority o voters were in avour o devolution but the reerendum was torpedoedby London authorities in government because it was said not enough people hadturned out to vote In 1997 another reerendum was held in which voters in Scot-land conclusively declared their preerence or devolved sel-determination and tax-raising powers A new Scottish parliament was built and opened in 1999

Robert Burnsrsquos great song insisting that the human worth o any individual is thetrue measure o his or her value and not their economic or social status ndash lsquoA Manrsquos aMan For arsquo Tatrsquo ndash was powerully sung by Sheena Wellington on the occasion andmany press reports noted that the orceul sentiments o the song prompted irritatedand uncomortable comments rom the landed gentry and the aristocracy amongthe assembled company It would be wrong to underestimate the immediate effectand social relevance o Burnsrsquos words even now Tis was the report in Te Australiannewspaper lsquochosen by the organisers instead o Britainrsquos national anthem ldquoGod Savethe 983121ueenrdquo [Burns] hails the nobility o honest poverty and pokes un at the titles andtrappings o nobilityrsquo

o members o Britainrsquos nobility the song was a slap in the ace to the royal amilylsquoBy choosing this song and rejecting the national anthem they are flaunting a sort

o separatism in a Parliament which is supposed to preserve the United Kingdomrsquo theEarl o Lauderdale said

In an emotional twist all 129 new members o the Scottish Parliament loudly joined in or the last verse which proclaims that a day will come when lsquoover all theearthrsquo men will become brothers

Donald Dewar Scotlandrsquos First Minister added in an ensuing speech lsquoAt the hearto the song is a very Scottish conviction that honesty and simple dignity are priceless

virtues not imparted by rank or birth or privilege but part o the soulrsquo

wo new poems were written or the new parliament in praise o what should and mightbe done with Scotlandrsquos resumed powers and renewed political purpose Te first was byIain Crichton Smith who praised the democratic basis o Scotland as a lsquothree-voiced coun-tryrsquo in which Gaelic Scots and English were clearly seen as co-existing national languagesreminding the people o the variousness o their identity Te second was written by EdwinMorgan who was given the designation o National Poet (or Scots Makar the medievalScots term or poet) effectively Scotlandrsquos first Poet Laureate on 16 February 2004

In the early twenty-first century Scotland was a devolved power within the UnitedKingdom with citizens o the country entitled to British passports and subject to lawsendorsed in England On matters o international significance such as relations with the

USA the nuclear industry the activities o the British army international trade and eco-nomic relations global industries power resided in London On some national Scottishmatters such as priorities in education and land rights the devolved Scottish parliament

proved effective in bringing about constructive change On certain questions that mightbe openly debated the people o Scotland ndash whether marching in public demonstrationsor in the letters pages o the national press ndash have been more expressive than many o their

political representatives And in 2007 three hundred years aer the reaty o Union o1707 they elected a Scottish Nationalist government to power in Edinburgh

Hugh MacDiarmidrsquos poem lsquoScotlandrsquo describes something essential about theunfinished story o the nation that is also represented in the multi-aceted under-researched archives o the nationrsquos literature and both the effort and love required toopen those archives ully Tis is how it begins

It requires great love o it deeply to readTe configuration o a landGradually grow conscious o fine shadingsO great meanings in slight symbolsHear at last the great voice that speaks solySee the swell and all upon the flank O a statue carved out in a whole c ountryrsquos marbleBe like Spring like a hand in a window Moving New and Old things careully to and roMoving a raction o flower herePlacing an inch o air thereAnd without breaking anything

MacDiarmidrsquos task as he described it in this poem was to lsquohave gathered unto mysel All the loose ends o Scotlandrsquo ndash

And by naming them and accepting themLoving them and identiying mysel with themAttempt to express the whole



6 What is Scottish Literature

7

Te history o Scotland and the people who have lived in Scotland inorms the trajec-tory o a distinctive Scottish literature Particular themes related to that history arerepresented in Scottish literature For example the union o the parliaments in 1707

precipitated a number o poems and songs which are part o a long tradition o literary work addressing the question o the national identity o Scotland its role within theBritish Empire and the hostility o many o our best writers to imperialism Te era oEnlightenment and Romanticism rom around 1750 to around 1840 is distinctivelycomplex in Scottish literature In English literature this era is conventionally seenas a progression rom the classical precision snap and crackle o Pope to the indi-

vidualistic radicalism and grand gestures o Shelley In Scottish literature however amore complex blend o these two cultural contexts is evident in or example Burns(certainly Romantic but also a child o the Enlightenment) and Scott (certainly anEnlightenment writer but also the novelist whose heroes and heroines include the

Highland outlaw Rob Roy and the peasant cow-eederrsquos daughter Jeanie Deans)In lsquoTe Lay o the Last Minstrelrsquo Scottrsquos amous declaration o loyalty to individualnational identity is both one o the grandest o Romantic gestures and an assertion ocomprehensive social character

Breathes there the man with soul so dead Who never to himsel hath saidTis is my own my native land

O Caledonia stern and wildMeet nurse or a poetic childLand o brown heath and shaggy woodLand o the mountain and the flood hellip

A similar complexity can be understood in Scottish literaturersquos relation to Modernism James Joyce S Eliot and Ezra Pound dedicated themselves to aesthetic priorities tocleave away rom Victorian sentimentalism secure hierarchies o perspective and thereliable rhythms o the iambic pentameter and in Poundrsquos phrase lsquoMake it new rsquo ButMacDiarmid Lewis Grassic Gibbon Sorley MacLean and others were in the 1920s

1930s and early 1940s dedicated not only to making it new but also recovering andrecuperating a vast neglected history o literary practice and lived experience romScotlandrsquos past especially in the lsquosubjectrsquo languages Scots and Gaelic For them tomake it new was to reclaim and reinvent the ancient

Tinking o that historical trajectory letrsquos take a journey through Scottish litera-ture now at some speed a very ast overview o the whole story Tis will leave outmasses o material but i it sounds out a shape a terrain a statue carved out o a wholecountryrsquos marble then it might act as an overture or a more discursive and detailedengagement with individual authors and works

An Overview of Scottish Literature

Scottish literature is one o the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe and covers animmense range o experience in history and social context language and characterIn Scottish literature you will meet some o the worldrsquos major authors and mostessential writing And you will be introduced to aspects o Scotland and Scottishlie which are available nowhere else there are authors and works here that aresimply unimaginable outwith Scotland Scottish literature has oen been describedin historical periods and specific cultural movements Tese are the contours o acomplex terrain

1 Early Literature

Te earliest works we might consider in a constellation that shines into the begin-ning o an identifiable tradition o Scottish literature include the stories o the greatCeltic warriors and lovers such as Cuchulain who learned the arts o war on Skyeand Deirdre who spent nine o her happiest years o lie in Glen Etive and its sur-rounding valleys Tese stories and the songs that go with them predate Christianityin Scotland and the image o Ossian returning aer long absence to a Christianised

world rom which his ormer companions the Celtic warriors have all departed isone o the signal evocations o haunting and loss that underpin many depictions o theGaelic world all the way to the twentieth century and Sorley MacLeanrsquos poem aboutthe cleared township o Hallaig on his native Raasay

Norse and Icelandic sagas touch on aspects o Scotlandrsquos North Atlantic loca-tion and its surrounding islands especially Te Orkneyinga Saga which had such aninfluence on George Mackay Brown in the twentieth century Te sagas emphasisethe extent to which the northern islands Orkney and Shetland and the Outer andInner Hebrides in the western sea were all or a long time identified with Scandi-navian authorities rather than with the kingdom o Scotland But the sea is an openroad

It brought Columba rom Ireland and Christian literature such as the great poemlsquoAltus Prosatorrsquo (lsquoIn Praise o God the Most Highrsquo) attributed to him was written inLatin Tere is a great deal o early work in this tradition rom Iona and elsewhereincluding the Book o Kells created on Iona and Adomnaacutenrsquos biography o Columbaone o the earliest biographies we have Itrsquos ull o great stories like Columbarsquos com-manding the Loch Ness Monster to stop terrorising the locals or the old white horse

who walks over and gently lays its long head on Columbarsquos shoulder on the day o hisdeath

Literature written in what we might call Welsh also orms part o the early hinter-land especially the sixth-century poem Te Gododdin an unorgettable assembly ochiaroscuro visions or glimpses o fighters in blood and defiance Te 83 ragments inthe A-text scatter abstractions and concrete images together It begins




Courage o young men eager to fight ndashTe thick hair waves o the manes o the stallions riding ndashTe young men gripping their horsesrsquo bellies with strong legs riding ndashEach with a light shield strapped over the rump o his horse ndashSwordblades shine blue Teir clothes have gold ringes ndashI praise you On a field all puddled and sodden with blood ndashoo young to be married you were eaten by crows ndashBeore they could bury you Owen is lying there covered in ravens ndashIn what ar place was old Markrsquos only son hacked down

Te ethos o the poem is reminiscent o acitusrsquos Agricola (98 983137983140) in which the warriorCalgacus conronts advancing Roman troops with a damned but defiant speech to hisown army denouncing imperialism

In Ruthwell near Dumries in the south o Scotland stands the Ruthwell Cross a

tall stone sculpture on which ragments o the Old English poem lsquoTe Dream o theRoodrsquo can be discerned Tis poem is a memorable evocation o the human sacrificecrystallised in the image o Christrsquos crucifixion as it reads as i spoken by the crossitsel telling us what it was like to bear the weight o the body o the man who diedto save humankind

So literature in Gaelic Norse Latin Welsh and Old English are all part o thelinguistic mix we begin with

2 Medieval Renaissance and Reformation LiteratureTis would include the poems associated with the Wars o Independence John Bar-bourrsquos Te Bruce and Blind Harryrsquos Te Wallace Tese are historical fictions stories ullo adventure and anecdote based on the verisimilitude o chronicle history mythologis-ing the Scottish patriotic heroes in their time (not entirely unlike Mel Gibsonrsquos attemptto mythologise Wallace as Braveheart in the 1990s) But one o the most significanthistorical documents in our history is also a magnificent and lastingly influential pieceo literature the Declaration o Arbroath (1320) Ten the three great Scots poets othe fieenth and sixteenth centuries ndash Robert Henryson William Dunbar and GavinDouglas ndash demand thorough reading Henrysonrsquos estament o Cresseid is one o thegreat works o world literature a proto-humanist tragedy with intensely realised char-acters and a pantheon o inhuman gods Dunbar writing at the Renaissance court o

James IV (which flourished 1488ndash1513) was contemporary with the major composer o polyphonic choral church music Robert Carver arguably Scotlandrsquos greatest composerDunbar has an enormous range o work rom the spine-chillingly humble lament orthe poets he has known who have all died to the sexually shocking vision o lsquoTe Danceo the Seven Deadly Sinsrsquo and the discursive poem lsquoTe wo Married Women and the

Widowrsquo Douglas also introduced his own descriptions o Scotland and Scotlandrsquos land-scape and weather into the preaces to his translation o Virgilrsquos Aeneid

Te enormous play by David Lyndsay Ane Satire o the Trie Estaitis (probablyfirst perormed 1540 expanded or perormances in 1552 and 1554) is a large-scale

political satire portending the Reormation and demanding political and ecclesiasti-cal sel-correction In it King and Church are led astray by sel-indulgence and theattractions o sin but Lyndsay insists that the answer is not only to mend their waysin the social structures o their era but also to pay attention to the complaints o thecommon people ndash John the Commonweal speaks up eloquently when he enters thescene in the second hal o the play Te immense hinterland o the unrepresented

people o Scotland is finding its own voice

3 Literature of the Enlightenment and RomanticismTis is perhaps the most amiliar lsquogreat agersquo o Scottish literature taking in the workso the Enlightenment philosophers alongside the Gaelic poets and the vernacularScots tradition o Ramsay Fergusson and Burns Walter Scott might be seen as thefigure who attempts to bring all these aspects into a comprehensive vision

Itrsquos important to note though that Ramsayrsquos attempt to reactivate a Scottishtheatre tradition (which ell oul o the Church) and his anthologies o early Scottish

poetry (including Henryson and Dunbar) and William Hamilton o Gilbertfieldrsquoslsquomodernrsquo translation o Blind Harryrsquos historical episodic epic Te Wallace were alleffectively emphasising the longer traditions o Scottish literature and were keenlyappreciated by both Burns and Scott

A related point worth noting here is that the Ossianic stories recounted by JamesMacpherson ndash which were internationally popular at the time and initiated ragingdebate about their validity or authenticity as translations ndash were in act imaginativereconstructions o and variations rom the old Celtic stories o the Ossianic heroesand lovers now re-written in Enlightenment English or a highly literate readershipMacphersonrsquos work reclaimed the antiquity o Scottish Gaelic literature or an Engl ish-language readership at a time when Dr Johnson was asserting the primacy o Englishlanguage and literature and the Eurocentric traditions that give weight to English l it-erature reaching back through Roman to Greek antiquity What made Macphersonanathema to Johnson was the implicit claim that Scotland had an ancient civilisationand literature o its own

It was not so much concern with antiquity but engagement with language in itsimmediacy and movement that vitalised the writing o Robert Burns probably themost amous songwriter in the world Growing up in Ayrshire in the company o peo-

ple whose language was quickened and inormed by a arm-world sensibility amiliar with natural priorities in husbandry sexuality sympathy and humour Burns was alsorelatively well-educated with a healthy intellectual curiosity and a vigorous appetiteor discussion He was an Enlightenment thinker but a Romantic (or at least proto-Romantic) artist both prooundly socialised and a perormative individualist Tisis evident throughout his writing not only in poems and songs but also extensivelyin his letters and travel-journals It was his contemporary the sentimental novelistHenry Mackenzie who called him a lsquoheaven-taught ploughmanrsquo thus establishing amyth taken up by the city-sophisticates o Edinburgh and which Burns himsel to




some extent endorsed But the legend o an untutored or lsquonaturalrsquo genius is belied notonly by the education Burns received but also the cra and wiliness o his poems bythe sophistication o his verse-letters to his riends in Ayrshire by the subtle balancesand structures o his songs and by the immense organisational skill at work in the

vertiginous velocity o his narrative poem lsquoam orsquo Shanterrsquo in which a multitude oevents are in action almost beore theyrsquore mentioned in the text Te poem as is wellknown tells the story o an Ayrshire armer who aer a market day spent carousing

with riends sets off home on horseback only to pause beore the old ruined church inthe village o Al loway which he sees is strangely illuminated He goes closer Troughthe glassless window he sees a dance o witches and warlocks with the Devil himselsitting in a corner playing the bagpipes One particularly attractive young witch (be-guiling rom beyond the mortal realm) so invigorates his drunken enthusiasm that hecalls out lsquoWeel donersquo ndash and everything is suddenly plunged in darkness as the lsquohellish

legionrsquo swarms out to try to catch and kill him Te chase is on or him to reach thebridge over the river Doon ndash the original lsquoBrig orsquo Doonrsquo ndash because the spirits o thedead cannot cross running water (they must keep to their own local habitation) ammakes it ndash just Te sexy young witch leaps ahead o the rest and clutches amrsquos horsersquostail pulling it clean off beore it leaps over the keystone o the bridge Te poem seemsto end moralistically but in act it engages the reader by its speed and willingness toengage in the gamesome the drunken the dancing the chase the liveliness o actionTere are a multitude o different acets to Burnsrsquos achievement but the night-ride

with am is one o the great irreverent pleasures in world literatureLike Burns also irreverently contemporary and unhampered by antiquarianism

in the early nineteenth century Byron was writing long narrative poems and travel-ling through Europe in various degrees o political engagement ndash characteristicallya much more picaresque Scottish figure than his English Romantic contemporariesHis contemporary Walter Scott turned the course o literary history in a new direc-tion away rom long narrative poems and towards prose fiction with his internation-ally popular Waverley Novels O the two main aspects o the Waverley Novels oneis prooundly significant or Scottish literature the other is o major consequence in

western literar y history In a series o novels dealing with events o the Scottish pastndash the Jacobite rising o 1745 the Covenanters the post-Union Porteous Riots andthe question o justice in the newly United Kingdom ndash Scott accumulates a com-

prehensive v ision o S cottish national i dentity rom the S hetland islan ds to his na-tive Borders Tese novels ndash among them Waverley Guy Mannering Old Mortality

Rob Roy Te Bride o Lammermoor Te Heart o Midlothian Redgauntlet ndash areessential texts o Scottish literature But also major themes o racial prejudice andsocial justice the rights o women warriors and bourgeoisie the reckless and the

prudent all eature in his internationally popular novels o medieval Romance ndashsuch as Ivanhoe Te alisman and Te Fortunes o Nigel

Perhaps the most prophetic o Scottrsquos contemporaries is James Hogg whose Con- essions o a Justified Sinner prefigures Stevensonrsquos Jekyll and Hyde as a oreshadowing

paradigm o the divided sel more amiliar in twentieth-century literature Hoggrsquos dis-tinctive place in Scottish literature however is also specific to a period in which theashionable popularity o printed novels and the growing science o psychologicalunderstanding is contemporaneous with a popular tradition o oral storytelling and asensitivity to the inexplicable things in lie sometimes described in supernatural termsI Scott brings together aspects o Enlightenment and Romanticism Hogg brings quali-ties o high literary sophistication together with the complex oral arts o storytellingdeveloped by illiterate people to create distinctive and disturbingly ambiguous readingso the human situation that still seem deeply troubling and in touch with contemporaryrealities

4 Literature of the later Nineteenth and Twentieth CenturiesPerhaps the pre-eminent writer o the later nineteenth century is Stevenson whose

novella Jekyll and Hyde short stories lsquoTe Ebb -idersquo and lsquoTe Beach at Falesaacutersquo childrenrsquosnovel reasure Island and Scottish novels Kidnapped and Te Master o Ballantraeamount to a body o work defining many characteristics o his own time and o thatto come Scottish to the bone Francophile anti-Calvinist international traveller hecrossed America and went into the South Pacific breaking new ground in Scottish lit-erature with prophetic visions o an approaching century o division and disaster Yetthe energy and delight o his writing is perennially inectious ndash he conveys the pleasureso childhoodrsquos energy appetite movement and growing strengths At the same time hischildren encounter the viciousness o adulthood ndash Jim Hawkins sees that Long John Sil-

ver is a murderer ndash and the long journey o Kidnapped taking the reader across Scotlandin a geographical exploration that has allowed generations o readers to ollow the mapto places we have never actually visited even on our doorstep is not only exhilarating butalso uncomortable Friendship is at the heart o the book but parting is its conclusion

Stevensonrsquos contemporaries in Scottish literature were the writers o the Kailyard andanti-Kailyard Te word means lsquocabbage-patchrsquo or vegetable garden the implication be-ing that in the small towns o Scotland people grow their own and look aer themselvesquite happily domestic virtues prevail in little societies presided over by minister andschoolteacher Excessive sentimentalisation and small-mindedness go alongside anti-intellectualism and oppose recognition o the difficult questions o some extent the vi-sion o Scotland presented in such writing as the stories o the minister Ian Maclaren andthe poems collected in the lsquoWhistlebinkiersquo anthologies o the time was eagerly requiredby generations o Scots living abroad all over the world who wanted images o Scotlandthat reconfirmed their sense o a happy home now le behind

Te anti-Kailyard writers included George Douglas Brown whose novel Te House with the Green Shutters is arguably the most devastating o all novels besideDostoevsky No other novel ends in such an utter and comprehensive vision odisease disaster and death the patriarch sees his small-town empire taken awayrom him and is murdered by his son who in turn meets his violent end along withhis sister and their cancer-ridden mother J Macdougall Hayrsquos Gillespie is also an




apocalyptic vision o small-town Scotland this time the fishing village o arbertLoch Fyne One o the great moments in the novel is the conflagration o the entirefishing fleet in the harbour And there are the lsquoDark Poetsrsquo o this era who alsoredress the cosy fictions o the saccharine lsquoWhistlebinkiesrsquo James Young Geddes

writes o industrialised Dundee with the moral outrage o Blake and the radical poetic line o his American contemporary Walt Whitman Ro bert Buchananrsquos po -ems about London Judas Iscariot the desolate Loch Coruisk in Skye all speak othe Godless universe o the late nineteenth-century industrial Empire Even more

poignantly the atheist John Davidson unable to bear the uncons oling material ismo the modern world walked into the sea at Penzance And James (lsquoBVrsquo) Tomsonin Te City o Dreadul Night produced one o the key poems o the era and one o thegreat visionary poems o any era ndash hugely influential on and some would argue morehaunting more deeply effective than Eliotrsquos Te Waste Land Eliot himsel acknowl-

edged the significance o Davidson and Tomson or his work Between these twoextremes stands JM Barrie exploring the conditions o childhood and childishnessin Peter Pan and Sentimental ommy but also going urther to see the inadequacies othat lsquokailyardrsquo sentimentalism in ommy and Grizzel which sees the miserable end othe aspiration o the small-town lsquoScotsman on the makersquo in London

Itrsquos important to see the dynamics o the late nineteenth century providing theground or what was to ollow in the 1920s but it had to b e rediscovered Te biolo -gist town-planner and social visionary Patrick Geddes had heralded what he calledan approaching lsquoScottish Renascencersquo in the 1890s but it took a while to arrive TeFirst World War o 1914ndash1918 the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 the RussianRevolution in 1917 all blew apart the imperial certainties and authority o Britishmonarchical rule upon which the nineteenth-century empire had been built

When Hugh MacDiarmid (CM Grieve) began writing in the 1920s it was precisely the sense o a new dispensation an urgent need to write Scotland into thenew century that motivated him and many o his contemporaries ndash in music paint-ing sculpture and literary and cultural criticism Tis was the period MacDiarmidnamed lsquoTe Scottish Literary Renaissancersquo Social and political vision inormed liter-ary production in the works o Lewis Grassic Gibbon Neil Gunn William SoutarEdwin Muir James Bridie Ewan MacColl Joe Corrie Ena Lamont Stewart NaomiMitchison Catherine Carswell Willa Muir and Nan Shepherd All these writers ad-dressed political issues directly and their poetry fiction and drama had to find neworms in which to develop their ideas o what Scotland ndash and Scottish literature ndashmight be Tat imaginative revisioning involved both a sense o reawakened nationalidentity and a sense o socialist egalitarianism

Aer the Second World War however National Socialism was a tainted term and inthe 1950s and early 1960s the nationalist ideal was compromised by the sense that anyidea o lsquonational destinyrsquo was linked to the notion o lsquoracial identityrsquo and thereore badlysmeared with the legacies o Nazism In the Cold War context nevertheless a great gen-eration o Scottish poets emerged all with their avoured places in Scotland each with

a particular expertise in at least one o the languages o Scotland to name only a ewo them Sorley MacLean (rom Raasay and Skye writing in Gaelic) George MackayBrown (rom Orkney writing in English) rom Edinburgh Norman MacCaig (writ-ing in English) Robert Garioch and Sydney Goodsir Smith (both writing in Scots)mainly associated with Lewis in the Outer Hebrides Iain Crichton Smith (writing inEnglish and Gaelic) and rom Glasgow Edwin Morgan who was to become the firstNational Poet o Scotland appointed by the Scottish Executive on 16 February 2004And o course until his death in 1978 MacDiarmid remained their contemporary ormany a riend and or many more a sharp and irrepressible catalyst Many o the novelistso post-war Scotland moved away rom a specifically nationalist position to an inter-national provenance ndash Muriel Spark and Robin Jenkins are among the finest But thenational question remained

5 Modern and Contemporary LiteratureSince the 1980s the ideas and ideals o MacDiarmidrsquos 1920s Scottish Literary Renais-sance began to resurace in the revised and renewed orms o a new generation Treekey texts o the 1980s suggest this recovery o the ideal o sel-determination AlasdairGrayrsquos Lanark Edwin Morganrsquos Sonnets fom Scotland and Liz Lochheadrsquos play Mary

Queen o Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off Grayrsquos novel comprehensively presents Scotland in its material actual history

inormed and activated by the creative imagination Hard-headed understanding oeconomic realities and personal limitations go alongside exhilarating large-scale vi-sions o a parallel world in which the constraints o reality can be broken ndash thoughothers inevitably arise Morganrsquos sonnets use one the high poetic art orms o Europeto traverse Scotlandrsquos story rom prehistory to post-history real events and peopleunexpected visitors and strange truths all come into the kaleidoscope as unnamedinterstellar travellers look over all that Scotland has been might have been and mig ht

yet be Lochheadrsquos play is not only specifically about figures rom Scottish history butalso as its title insists about how your history is conveyed to younger generations ndashthrough a childrenrsquos game or through history books I such books are written by the

victors perhaps they are best understood by the losersConcurrently and increasingly through the 1990s and into the twenty-first cen-

tury there was a massive quantity o first-class scholarly work published all based inarchival research reviewing and evaluating or new g enerations almost all the fields ocultural production in Scotland ndash especially literature art and music Tis is ongoingTe resources o the National Library o Scotland are still under-explored by scholarsand Scottish literature is perhaps the single most under-researched area in all literarystudies Yet contemporary writers are flourishing in novels specifically dealing withcontemporary oen domestic and social themes in poetry not only personal and lyri-cal but also pol itically explicit l ike Edwin Morganrsquos poem written or the opening othe Scottish Parliament lsquoOpen the Doorsrsquo and in drama with the lively and as-yetundefined potential o the new National Teatre o Scotland




Twenty-fve essential Scottish writers hellip

Tere could as easily be a hundred o course In other words there are many other writ-ers equally lsquoessentialrsquo but Irsquove selected twenty-five here to start with Cards on the tablethis list seriously under-represents women playwrights writing in all genres in the Gaeliclanguage and many o the anonymous poems and songs that are essential to Scottishliterature including the Ballads It is not a list o the Major Authors in Scottish literaturebut a list o some o the essential writers I wouldnrsquot want to be without and I could saythe same about others who arenrsquot named here Many o them and their works have beennoted in the little essays above and some are much better-known than others so or themost part Irsquom only going to make slight suggestions about them in the list below

Robert Henryson (c1450ndashc1505)Te estament o Cresseid is Henrysonrsquos most prooundly searching extended narrative poem but there are also Orpheus and Eurydice and the sequence o Aesoprsquos Moral Fables which taken together amount to a small compendium o stories which balance and coun-terpoint each other Henryson is the most sympathetic o poets which gives him a deptho human understanding and a hard sense o the tragic aspect o liersquos wasteulness

William Dunbar (c1460ndashc1520) Writing at the Renaissance court o James IV Dunbarrsquos poems are linguistically dy-namic and packed with razory images All his poems bring colour erocity and seri-ousness to what they depict Tere is enormous variety in Dunbarrsquos work there areeighty-our numbered poems in Proessor Bawcuttrsquos definitive edition every one o

which has brilliance rom the provocative perversities o lsquoTe Dance o the SevenDeadly Sinsrsquo to the ormal courtly celebration o the marriage o James IV and Mar-garet udor in 1503 lsquoTe Trissil and the Rosersquo to the courtly yet intensely personaland adult love lyric lsquoSweet Rose o Virtue and o Gentlenessrsquo

Sir David Lyndsay (c1486ndashc1555)

Lyndsayrsquos poems like his great play Ane Satire o the Trie Estaitis are concerned withthe state o Scotland on the eve o the Reormation lsquoTe Dremersquo spells out the richeso the nation in its natural resources and the strength o character o its people butthe play is really astonishing It should be firmly established in the repertoire o theNational Teatre o Scotland and revived at least once every twenty years New ver-sions o parts o it rewritten to apply to contemporary politicians and media fig uresare easily imaginable and could be produced every five years (in any country) to helpkeep people entertained engaged and above all critical

Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald) (c1695ndashc1770)A serious student o bardic verse a student at Glasgow University then a teacher in theHighlands he became an elder in the church writing love songs satires on local figuresnature poems poems in praise o the Jacobite cause and most impressively lsquoTe Birlinn

o Clanranaldrsquo Tis describes a sea-voyage in virtuoso verse startling in immediacy anddetail Tis is someone who writes about things o which he has immense experienceand knowledge in verse that bristles zips and bounds with verbal energy MacDiarmidrsquosEnglish translation in Te Golden reasury o Scottish Poetry is a delight

Tobias Smollett (1721ndash1771)Smollett read medicine at Glasgow University and became a shiprsquos surgeon His firstnovel Te Adventures o Roderick Random included accounts o his shipboard lie anddisplayed a sly satirical abundantly wry sense o humour His last novel Te Expeditiono Humphry Clinker is a picaresque account o a motley group o unreliable characterson an extended peregrination throughout Britain Some o what were to become identi-fied as national characteristics o Scotland are described beore they developed into cari-catures or clicheacutes and Smollettrsquos understanding o how these evolve in the immediate

context o a newly created lsquoUnited Kingdomrsquo is deep sensitive and i comic also carriesa knowledge o the cost involved in limiting human character by stereotype

Donnchadh Ban Mac an t-Saoir (Duncan Bagraven MacIntyre) (1724ndash1812)One o the greatest poems in the Gaelic tradition is lsquoMoladh Beinn Doacutebhrainrsquo (lsquoIn Praiseo Ben Dorainrsquo) the great mountain which can be seen by the roadside i yoursquore drivingrom Glasgow north to Glencoe Te poet evokes an increasingly tense hunt or thedeer which is to be shot gralloched and turned into ood or the pot Tis poem there-ore has an element o the Wordsworthian sublime about it and an element o JamesTomsonrsquos sense o the actual beauty o nature but these are mixed with an unwaveringsense o the complementarity o beauty and practical needs

James Macpherson (1736ndash1796)Macpherson born in 1736 grew up in a Gaelic-speaking part o Scotland and was nine

years old at the time o the Jacobite rising o 1745 As a young man he went into theHighlands and listened to stories and songs many o them versions o the Celtic cyclesHe knew enough Gaelic to make sense o them but he wrote them up in English withan Enlightenment readership in mind He infiltrated the Gaelic world into an Enlight-

enment sense o superiority Wersquore accustomed to thinking o them as Irish stories butMacphersonrsquos versions are all located in Scotland So herersquos the question ndash what i hisstories were true

Robert Burns (1759ndash1796)Burns should be read through his poems and songs o course but his letters and travel

journals are also very revealing and his entire writing lie thereore needs to be seenin at least three different contexts first that o his extraordinary biography and thelocations in which it took place second that o his historical period spanning therevolutions in France and America and third that o his connections both literal andin terms o literary affinity with his contemporaries including the Scottish Enlight-enment writers the English Romantic poets and internationally poets o visionarysocial democracy rom Walt Whitman to Pablo Neruda




James Hogg (1770ndash1835)Hogg grew up as a cowherd and shepherd in the Borders learning the ways o thecountry As a young man he had access to a good collection o books which stirred aliterary appetite Te Brownie o Bodsbeck (1818) has one o the greatest first sentenceso any novel but Hoggrsquos masterpiece is Te Private Memoirs and Conessions o a Justi-

fied Sinner (1824) recognised by Andreacute Gide in the 1920s as proto-modernist slip- ping between psychological acuity and the supernaturally inexplicable then picked upagain in the 1950s as a proto-postmodernist novel but nowadays understood as the

work o a determined literary artist who comprehended deeply the overlap betweenthe oral and the written traditions and the ghosts who haunt the memory

Sir Walter Scott (1771ndash1832)Scottrsquos writing career describes a deepening tragic vision Waverley optimistically de-

scribes a young Englishmanrsquos encounter with Scotland at the time o the Jacobite risingo 1745 his lsquowaveringrsquo in his allegiances Te Heart o Midlothian is one o the worldrsquosgreat novels beginning with the alleged murder o a child by his mother and ending

with the very probable murder by the same child o his own ather Te Bride o Lam-mermoor occupies a Samuel Beckett-like world o darkness and division the unspeakablesilences between people while Redgauntlet brings to deflation the Romantic ideals thathad persuaded Waverley Tere is deep pathos but Scott can also be extremely unny

with richly absurd characters interrupting intensely gestural moments o high drama inor example A Legend o Montrose Scottrsquos work invites extensive reassessment

Susan Ferrier (1782ndash1854)Ferrierrsquos novels Marriage (1818) Te Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831) were admiredby Scott and evidently effected a bridge between his world to that o Jane Austen Marriage sets out to be a didactic moral tome but the complexities o temptation exhilaration ironyand un take over Caricature and exaggeration are among Ferrierrsquos weapons ollowing hermain character Juliana Glenern as she elopes with the dashing Captain Henry Douglasand travels to his Highland castle Ferrierrsquos two later novels continue the vein o orthright

satire and ironic comment Her humour is suggested by the bold and cheeky first line oTe Inheritance with its eyebrow raised over Austenrsquos first novel lsquoIt is a truth universallyacknowledged that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that o pridersquo

Margaret Oliphant (1828ndash1897)Oliphant wrote more than ninety novels and two hundred short stories ndash more thanmost readers could critically evaluate Her most memorable works are the novel

Kirsteen the supernatural short stories and the novella A Beleaguered City Many othese tales in their subtle developments o the imagery o light and darkness theirsocial realism riddled with supernatural and inexplicable components their psycho-logical representations acute yet inected by a sense o the ineffable pressures that mightbuild towards violence are developing an account o the tensions and orce o sexualidentity that will only find ull expression in the twentieth century

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850ndash1894)Stevenson is the prophet o the twenty-first century as his contemporaries Conrad and

Wilde were prophets or the twentieth and his global travelling gave him a knowledge ocultural relativism ar ahead o his era In the shi rom the solid hierarchy o nineteenth-century realism in which the English language offered secure authorial and narrative

positions as opposed to the shiing priorities o the languages o individual charactersStevenson in stories like lsquoTrawn Janetrsquo and especially in the novel Te Master o Bal-lantrae developed the idea o the unreliable narrator pointing orward to Modernismand indeed to all that ollows in late twentieth and early twenty-first century culturalrelativism In his proound exploration o the relation tension and reciprocity betweenchildhood and adulthood he is one o the key writers in world literature

Catherine Carswell (1879ndash1946)

Open the Door ndash Carswellrsquos major novel ndash ollows the lie o Joanna Bannerman one othe great women in modern fiction through a disastrous marriage and its termination toa happy resolution while descriptions o early twentieth-century Glasgow and especiallyCharles Rennie Mackintoshrsquos Glasgow School o Art give the book historical depth Herother works include biographies o Burns DH Lawrence and Boccaccio and her ownbiography has been written by Jan Pilditch

Edwin Muir (1887ndash1959)Muirrsquos essay Scott and Scotland was at the centre o a major debate about language andliterature in the mid-1930s but Muirrsquos poetry developed its own character and signifi-cance most impressively in the 1940s and 1950s through his experience o Cold WarEurope In poems like lsquoTe Combatrsquo and lsquoTe Good ownrsquo he created semi-abstract

visions o conflict between good and evil innocence and malevolence in contexts osocial susceptibility showing how easily people might change or the worse in a worldnot too ar away rom that o Kafa His novels are also worth revisiting and his criti-cal essays rom the 1920s and 1930s remain historically significant

Willa Muir (1890ndash1970)Te startling novel Imagined Corners takes place in a small north-east Scottish townin which a young woman meets a whole range o not unexpected rustrations until thearrival o her namesake (almost her lsquoliberatedrsquo double) with news o lie in Europe anddifferent ways o seeing and doing things In the end they both head or Europe MrsGrundy in Scotland is an extended essay about sexual repression in Scotland and thememoir Belonging is a rich account o her lie her marriage to Edwin and their riendsand acquaintances including Hugh MacDiarmid

Neil Gunn (1891ndash1973)Neil Gunnrsquos cycle o novels make up a comprehensive vision o Scotland Te best

place to start is with Highland River Tis begins with an epic fight between a youngboy and a huge salmon which he pursues upriver until he catches it Te novel experi-




ments with narrative juxtaposition in telling the story o brothers caught up rom theHighlands into the First World War Te humanist allegorical novels Y oung Art andOld Hector and Te Green Isle o the Great Deep might be read profitably alongsideGeorge Or well and Aldous Huxley Gunnrsquos masterpiece is Te Sil983158er Darlings a hugenovel about a group o people cleared rom their ormer community and making aliving fishing or herring His travel book Off in a Boat is a delight

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892ndash1978)Trough the 1400 pages o his Collected Poems (which are incomplete) the massivelybeguiling labyrinthine digressions o his so-called autobiography wildly uncontrolledat times Lucky Poet and in the intensely modernist visionary dense sketches and shortstories o Annals o the Five Senses MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve)unquestionably emerges as one o the major authors o the twentieth century standing

beside Joyce Pound and Yeats in terms o the magnitude o his achievement His biog-raphy revealed most intimately in his New Selected Letters opens doors on some o the worst and best aspects o being human at times it seems he was unorgivable at timesthe gentlest most generous o men Start anywhere his work is the biggest individual

plenum in Scottish literature since that o Walter Scott Itrsquos a big world ake a big bite

Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901ndash1935)Gibbonrsquos greatest work is the trilogy o novels A Scots 983121uair Sunset Song Cloud HoweGrey Granite and three short stories lsquoClayrsquo Smeddumrsquo and lsquoGreendenrsquo but he wrotea lot in the last ew years o his very short lie A major writer Gibbon (born JamesLeslie Mitchell) oen has strong women as central characters including a memorable

portrait in his first novel Stained Radiance set mainly in London In his best-knownScottish work he creates a startling linguistic idiom using Scots language phrases and

vocabulary amiliar rom his childhood in north-east Scotland although the narra-tives are easy to ollow or the English-language reader He also wrote science fiction(Gay Hunter and Tree Go Back)

Jessie Kesson (1916ndash1994)

Jessie Kesson set her novels in north-east Scotland and wrote largely rom personal experience but her work is not simply an attempt at realist autobiography Rather theseshort novels are beautiully-wrought arteacts the prose limpid and deliquescent theexperiences described sometimes joyous and celebrative sometimes brutal and brutalis-ing Te White Bird Passes and Another ime Another Place are classics o their kind

Muriel Spark (1918ndash2006)Spark described hersel as a poet with her literary roots in the Border Ballads o Scotland

with their sinister humour supernatural overtones human relationships in intense stateso unexpected and unreliable influence and strongly-defined characters Certainly hermost amous novel Te Prime o Miss Jean Brodie is a classic both righteningly seriousand inescapably comic and even in its title Te Ballad o Peckham Rye demonstrates itsallegiance But Sparkrsquos achievement among modern novelists is generally acknowledged

as internationally significant It would be as wrong to undervalue as to overvalue theScottish component o her work

Alasdair Gray (b1934)Gray has acknowledged the value o Te Dear Green Place the novel by Archie Hind(1928ndash2007) which like Lanark A Lie in Four Books (1981) is set in Glasgow andalso has at its centre the struggle o a young man to find artistic expression Lanark counterpoints realist narrative with antastical extrapolation rom it in a mysteriousimagination-uelled world which delivers its own strictures and violence Tis was abreakthrough novel which asserted and convincingly demonstrated the value o theartistic imagination without which lie will always be inadequate and wanting Grayis a major author o other novels novellae plays poems and is an artist whose illus-trations accompany many o his books Te most recent unclassifiable collection (a

novel memoirs collection o loosely-related stories) is Old Men in Lo983158e James Kelman (b1946)Kelmanrsquos novels rom the very first Te Busconductor Hines ocus on the experience o

working people (not all o them lsquoworking classrsquo) and carry a moral orce that insists that we must not evade the central matter o social injustice economic division and the need people have or better conditions better lives than most o us are likely to be given HisBooker Prize winner How Late It Was How Late is a compelling exploration o the

world o a blind man victimised and bullied trying to find a way through experiencehe struggles to make sense o It is a tour-de-orce o the writerrsquos art and his later workextends his range most searchingly in his novel about childhood Kieron Smith Boy

Janice Galloway (b1956)Gallowayrsquos first novel Te rick is to Keep Breathing was an extended study o a wom-an going through and recovering rom breakdown in her interior lie and her socialrelations Stylistically the book employs various typographical devices to show theunreliable text becoming increasingly unreliable but it is the compassion and strengtho resolution in the character Joy Stone in the title and in the writing itsel and by ex-

tension in the author that enduringly impresses Later work builds on these strengthsoen unexpectedly as with Clara a quasi-fictional imaginative biography o ClaraSchumann which is not only bristling with eminist priorities but assured in its graspo complex social and musical contexts

AL Kennedy (b1965)Kennedyrsquos collection o short stories Night Geometry and the Garscadden rains hasnumerous wise and witty observations (oen oblique) on the Scottish scene and hernovel So I Am Glad brings a magic-realist component to a eminist scenario in modernGlasgow Her novel Paradise is a genuinely unsettling study o alcoholism but ratherthan a realist text this is almost expressionist in its development o sel-delusional nar-rative and the attractions o rationalisation Her novel Day about a Second World Warbomber tailgunner is an astonishing work o historical reclamation and reinvention




hellip eleven later twentieth-century poets hellip

Robert Garioch (1909ndash1981)An Edinburgh poet o masterly vernacular wit compassion and insightul urban hu-mour Gariochrsquos translations into Scots o another city poet the Roman GiuseppeBelli are moving understated and evocative especially lsquoTe Puir Faimlyrsquo while hisown lsquoEdinburgh Sonnetsrsquo and seriouscomic poems lsquoBrother Wormrsquo lsquoPerectrsquo andlsquoDoctor Faust in Rose Streetrsquo are effortlessly both local and universal

Norman MacCaig (1910ndash1996)A master o tone humour irony and an inexhaustible resource o simile and metaphor(a thorn bush is lsquoan encyclopedia o anglesrsquo) MacCaig is a great love poet o the natu-

ral world ndash dogs rogs basking sharks sparrows ndash and a poet exploring the limits olanguage the borders o what language permits us to understand (his words he saysare sometimes spoken only by lsquoa man in my positionrsquo) He is also a great elegist in thesequence lsquoPoems or Angusrsquo

Sorley MacLean (1911ndash1996)MacLean translated his own poetry first written in Gaelic into unorgettable EnglishA major poet o love and war his long poem lsquoTe Cuillinrsquo his elegy or his brotherCallum and his passionate denunciation o nuclear authority in lsquoScreapadalrsquo shouldbe required reading but absolutely essential is his lament or the people o the clearedtownship on his native island o Raasay lsquoHallaigrsquo lsquothe dead have been seen aliversquo

Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915ndash1975)A flamboyant figure and lavish verbal profligate Goodsir Smith was a New Zea lander

who adopted Edinburgh and the Scots language to produce vivid evocations o theold city and its raucous sensitive loving and drinking inhabitants Rabelaisian andidealistic his book-length sequence o love poems Under the Eildon ree is a major

work gathering all the great lovers o world literature into a company where he him-

sel finds an affinity o comic and tragic realisation

WS Graham (1918ndash1986)A poet who lived much o his adult lie in Cornwall Grahamrsquos intense ocus on the

power o language and the immense pressure o the silence that surrounds it created last-ing potent works such as lsquoTe Nightfishingrsquo and the magnificent epiphany describing areturn to a small reservoir near his native place Greenock just outside Glasgow lsquoLochTomrsquo Stylistically inimitable he commented once when asked i he was still writingthat he was indeed still beginning each line with a capital letter ndash in other words henever relaxed into a merely conversational idiom but always maintained a fierce sense othe poem as a work o art a made thing Yet each poem is alive as a fish on the line andstronger than most in the pantheon o modern work in the English language

Edwin Morgan (b1920)Morganrsquos breakthrough volume Te Second Lie (1968) heralded a long career in whichmany poems are given to voice the experiences o other things ndash in the very sexy lsquoTeApplersquos Songrsquo or the hilarious and grumpy lsquoTe Loch Ness Monsterrsquos Songrsquo At the hearto his work is an individualrsquos compassion in urban poems like lsquoIn the Snack Barrsquo lsquoGlas-gow Greenrsquo lsquoriorsquo or lsquoAt Central Stationrsquo but in the 1980s Morgan developed a morenational indeed nationalist perspective in the key volume Sonnets fom Scotland Hehas continued to write well into the twenty-first century with conessional celebrativeand provocative autobiographical poems in A Book o Lives and public poems such asthose collected in Beyond the Sun written to accompany a list o Scotlandrsquos lsquoavourite

paintingsrsquo In his essays Morgan is also a major critic o modern Scottish literature andaer MacDiarmid modern Scotlandrsquos oremost Man o Letters

George Mackay Brown (1921ndash1996)Orkney and its people were George Mackay Brownrsquos home and subject his poemsexploring with patience and bright imagery his land and seascapes its history andlegends He was also a fine novelist (see Magnus a Brechtian retelling o the murdero the saint) and a superb short-story writer (see especially A Calender o Lo983158e and Aime to Keep) Te best place to start is his compendium o poems stories and essays

An Orkney apestry

Iain Crichton Smith (1928ndash1998)Beginning as an austere poet reacting against a world o Calvinist oppression Crich-ton Smith developed a fluent exploratory poetic style which sometimes seems carelessbut in act is invigorating risky and immediately accessible Also a novelist and shortstory writer his classic novella Consider the Lilies is a lucid limpid presentation othe Highland Clearances Te darkness o depression gripped him but in the Murdostories he developed a quizzical comic aspect

Liz Lochhead (b1948)Lochhead began to write poems exploring her own experience as a young woman in

Lanarkshire in the 1960s and 1970s developed her skills in creating personae andcharacters through writing dramatic monologues and original plays (see below) Her

poetry is col lected in Memo or Spring Dreaming Frankenstein rue Conessions amp New Clicheacutes Bagpipe Muzak and Te Colour o Black amp White

Carol Ann Duffy (b1955)Te title o Carol Ann Duffyrsquos collection Te Other Country indicates something o the

precision o metaphor she manages to pack into tight thoroughly-wrought poems olinguistic compression and rhetorical balance Otherness is there in the biography asshe notes in various poems born in Scotland moved to England as a child recollectingnot only place and people rom childhood but much more intimately a language idiomand music oreign to the environment which mature choices and adulthood is grown




into o conservative conventional Calvinist Scotland the lesbianism openly espousedin her poetry may also seem lsquootherrsquo but all we can do is recommend the American poetAdrienne Rich as a significant co-ordinate point in any reading o modern poetry andrecommend Richrsquos little book Poetry and Commitment which begins with an extensivetribute to Hugh MacDiarmid reminding us that real reedom fighters are good or eve-ryone ndash that is everyone who really believes in reedom

Jackie Kay (b1961)Kayrsquos first book Te Adoption Papers was an autobiographical sequence in different

voices depicting her own experience o growing up in Glasgow a black child adopted bycommitted socialist parents She later would write great lesbian love poetry and go ur-ther into the autobiographical experience exploring themes o belonging amily localnational and ancestral identity and questions o disposition and prejudice All o which

seems almost too sensational or the subtlety o her versification and belies the continu-ous good humour humanistic sympathy and sheer eloquence in all her writing Her novelrumpet is a compelling portrait o the conflicts o sexual and social sel-expression inthe world o jazz where the intensity o artistic commitment in music and the prioritieso domesticity are sometimes in comic but ultimately painul counterpoint

hellip and three modern playwrights

John McGrath (1935ndash2002)Te Cheviot the Stag and the Black Black Oil (1973) Tis was a watershed produc-tion which took the story o the Highlands ndash through the Jacobite rising o the1740s and the period o the Clearances through the nineteenth century when vasttracts o depopulated land were used or stag-hunting by absentee landlords highee-paying guests and royalty to the period when the discovery o oil in the NorthSea meant a new wave o exploitation o Scotlandrsquos natural resources and people

Expressly socialist and deeply traditional in its careully structured polemic the play was toured in the Hig hlands o Scotland and perormed to many pe ople who would never have s een it in a ci ty-based theatre It also has international res onance when I was teaching in New Zealand aer screening the play Maori students wouldoen come to me to point out in recognition lsquoBut thatrsquos our story Tatrsquos our storytoorsquo

Liz Lochhead (b1948) Mary Queen o Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) and Medea (2001) Lochheadbegan in the 1970s as a strong eminist voice with streetwise smart and poignantlylyrical quasi-autobiographical poems but she also developed an expertise in dramaticmonologues and the creation o memorable characters other than hersel Her brillianceas a playwright was amply confirmed in Mary Queen o Scots ndash the ull title is that o a

childrenrsquos game and with the characters acting the major historical figures both as adultsand children in a gamesome but ultimately deadly pageant o political entrapment andencroaching power the play asks us to consider how history is passed on to younger gen-erations through apparently innocent perormances and lasting iconography Lochheadhas also written witty sometimes light works or theatre social comedies based in Glas-gow but her versions o the Greek classics especially Medea show her deep and intui-tive grasp o the ull sense o tragedy addressing issues o eminism sel-destructivenesssocial positioning and the extremes o passionate response

Gregory Burke (b1968)Te international success o Black Watch (2006) coincided with the political victoryo the Scottish National Party in elections in Scotland the deployment o Scottishtroops in warare in Iraq and the dissolution o individual Scottish regiments ndash

including the actual Black Watch itsel ndash by the Westminster (London) governmentTe playrsquos writing is brilliant and intense catching the language strengths suspicionsand cares o the soldiers their acute understanding o where they are what their bestresources lie in and whose power they are under In perormance itrsquos also an astonish-ing piece o choreographed action depicting horrors in intense visual motion some-times ballet-like to effect a Brechtian distancing rom any ideas o easy commitmentor simple solution Black Watch is available on DVD along with a BBC documentaryabout historical events contemporary with the play

All o the plays noted here raise questions about commitment idealism loyalty andhuman need within and beyond the national context

It is another country Te air is sharper Te hills stark in their soliditysheer out in the lights It is a country in which history breathes rom thelandscapes My first impression o Edinburgh was o staircases which

seemed to have been carved on boulders and cobbled streets whichreminded me o secret courtyards in Paris and the South o France Itis a city o the imagination in which dwelled another city o rustrated

yearnings hellip It is the only city I know where the old resides so sol idly inthe new where the music o the place blasts out its ancient lore amidthe living spaces o the inhabitants Culture during a time o politicalimpotence can become kitsch but it can also unction as continualdeclaration and resistance

mdashBen Okri



24

About the ASLS

Founded in 1971 the Association for Scottish Literary Studies is an educationalcharity that aims to promote the study teaching and writing o Scottish literatureand to urther the study o the languages o Scotland o these ends ASLS publishes

works o Scottish literature which have e ither been neglected or which merit a resh presentation to a modern audience and critical anthologies o both creative and non-fiction writing Papers on literary criticism and cultural studies along with in-depthreviews o Scottish books are published biannually in our journal Scottish Literary

Review short articles eatures and news in ScotLit and scholarly studies o languagein Scottish Language

Te International Journal o Scottish Literature a ree peer-reviewed academic jour-

nal explores international perspectives on Scottish writing wwwijslstiracuk Te Bottle Imp a ree online ezine comes out twice a year and is ull o articlesopinions and arguments waiting to happen along with inormation on new develop-ments in Scottish literature and literary criticism wwwthebottleimporguk

We also publish New Writing Scotland an annual anthology o new poetry dramaand short fiction in Scots English and Gaelic which has carried early work by impor-tant contemporary writers including Iain Banks Janice Galloway AL Kennedy IanRankin and Irvine Welsh among many others We also produce the Scotnotes serieso school- and college-level study guides to major Scottish writers and our websitecontains a substantial and growing body o downloadable essays articles papers andclassroom notes wwwaslsorguk



Join us in 2009 when Scotland will host its first ever Homecoming year inspired by the 250th birthday celebrations of Scotlandrsquos

national poet Robert Burns Wersquove a country-wide programme of over 100 events celebrating Burns and some of Scotlandrsquos great

contributions to the world Whisky Golf Great Minds and Innovations and our rich culture and heritage which lives on at home and

through our global family Join our celebrations in 2009

Find out more at homecomingscotland2009com



1

What is Scottish Literature

A mountainous landscape sensually presented in vivid colours with deep seawater andreshwater lochs long stretches o land orming bays and peninsulas around inlets anatural and ancient world but with a scattering o houses a populated landscape arrom cities but occupied by people and the lives concerns loves and dispositions ogenerations Te painting on the cover is lsquoTe Cuillins Evening April 1964rsquo by JohnCunningham (1926ndash1998) In his own English translation the Gaelic poet SorleyMacLean (1911ndash1996) ends his poem lsquoTe Cuillinrsquo like this

Beyond the lochs o the blood o the children o menbeyond the railty o plain and the labour o mountainbeyond poverty consumption ever agony

beyond hardship wrong tyranny distressbeyond misery despair hatred treacherybeyond guilt and defilement watchulheroic the Cuillin is seenrising on the other side o sorrow

Te poem was written in 1939 at the beginning o the Second World War EvidentlyMacLeanrsquos understanding o the rise o Fascism in Europe was countered by the per-manent symbolic hope represented by the mountain range o his native place He wasborn on the island o Raasay beside Skye and grew up looking over towards thesemountains climbing them as a young man By the twentieth century o course mosto Scotlandrsquos population was living in the cities ndash Glasgow Edinburgh AberdeenDundee ndash and their experience was more generally urban than not So we might begin

with a recognisable image o Scotland as a place o natural beauty and symbolic au-thority but we must deepen our understanding with a sense o the historical complex-ity o S cotlandrsquos national identity beore we can begin to ully encounter the richnesso Scottish literature

lsquoScotlandrsquo is a word that names a particular nation defined by geographical borders

However in the early twenty-first century since the union o the crowns o Scotlandand England in 1603 and the union o the parliaments o Edinburgh and Londonin 1707 this nation exists within the political state o Great Britain and NorthernIreland with its global legacy o British imperialism Tereore it must be imaginedin two different dimensions as part o a political state called the United Kingdomand as a single nation o separate cultural distinction along with other nations in the

worldFor people who live within the borders o this nation certain things will be con-

erred by languages geology climate and weather architectural design terrain currentcultural habits and a history o cultural production that might be different rom suchthings elsewhere Te languages in which most Scottish literature is written ndash GaelicScots and English ndash coner their own rhythms sounds musical dynamics and relations

















































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An Orkney apestry

























mdashBen Okri



24

About the ASLS






























































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24

About the ASLS


























































































































































An Orkney apestry

























mdashBen Okri



24

About the ASLS
































mdashBen Okri



24

About the ASLS
















24

About the ASLS














what_is_scottish_literature.pdf

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