The modern Scottish novel
Subtitle: narrative and the national imagination
By: Cairns Craig.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Edinburgh
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
Subjects: Scottish fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Nationalism and literature -- Scotland -- History -- 20th century; Politics and literature -- Scotland -- History -- 20th century; Literature and society -- Scotland -- History -- 20th century; National characteristics, Scottish, in literature; Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 20th century; Scotland -- In literature
Description: "In the last quarter century, Scottish novelists from Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and Allan Massie to James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy and Irvine Welsh have achieved significant international success. In The Modern Scottish Novel Cairns Craig shows how the work of such writers is constructed by a powerful national tradition in the novel, formed in the first decades of the century by writers such as John Buchan, Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn, a tradition whose distinctive thematic and formal concerns have shaped a unique contribution to the novel in English." "Craig argues that the Scottish novel has had to develop a highly specific set of formal techniques to cope with a situation in which the dominance of the English language is challenged by the survival of the rich inheritance of Scots speech, and in which the continuing effects of Calvinism imply that all fiction is necessarily deceitful, when not actually diabolic. Craig also sets the Scottish novel in the specific traditions of Scottish intellectual life - from J. G. Frazer to John Macmurray and R. D. Laing."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-252) and index.