Title: The modern Scottish novel
First published: 1999
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.
Subjects: History, Scottish fiction, Politics and literature, Literature and society, Nationalism and literature, History and criticism, Narration (Rhetoric), National characteristics, Scottish, in literature, In literature, Scottish literature, history and criticism, English fiction, Scottish authors
Places: Scotland
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PR8603 .C73 1999