A Tartan Literature - The Rise of Scottish Modernism

Overview

What you will study

Around the end of the nineteenth century, Britain began to experience tensions in its Celtic fringe. Scottish writers and intellectuals like Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Edwin Muir, began to ponder the situation of Scotland in the UK. Responding to literary developments in Europe and America, the art nouveau of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the post-impressionism of the Scottish Colourists, they developed a form of Scottish modernism that reflected the decline of rural farming and the rise of urban industry and poverty. In doing so, they gave birth to a literary revival dubbed the Scottish Literary Renaissance.

Hugh McDiarmid championed the Scots dialect in his long modernist poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, exposing the negative impact of 'tartanry' on the Scottish psyche. Gibbon’s feminist 'land novel', Sunset Song, explored the end of an agricultural way of life in the face of industrialisation and war. And Edwin Muir’s 1932 novel Poor Tom, attempted to redeem his childhood experience of Glasgow industry and deprivation. 

Together these writers explored a range of possibilities for Scottish literature and nationhood, from socialism and communism to Home Rule and nationalism. The A Tartan Literature - The Rise of Scottish Modernism course offered by University of Oxford will explore more of this topic.