1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910778872903321

Autore

Craig Cairns

Titolo

The modern Scottish novel : narrative and the national imagination / / Cairns Craig

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Edinburgh : , : Edinburgh University Press, , 2009

ISBN

0-7486-7437-3

0-585-12403-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (256 p. )

Disciplina

823.9109358

Soggetti

English fiction - Scottish authors - History and criticism

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

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 242-252) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: novel, nation, tradition -- Fearful selves: character, community, and the Scottish imagination -- Dialect and dialectics -- Enduring histories: mythic regions -- The typographic muse -- Doubtful imaginings -- Conclusion: narrative and the space of the nation.

Sommario/riassunto

"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.