Scottish Modernism and Its Contexts 1918-1959

This innovative book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.Key Features *The first study of a Scottish modernism extending in its impact to the 1950s and drawing on influences from British and European modernism *Original perspectives on the literature of the period through discussion of a range of writers and writing genres *Detailed consideration of the work of women writers in the context of modernism and in their response to social change *A contribution to the expansion of the idea of modernism in its focus both on the modernist artist's role in social and national renewal and on writing from the peripheries of small town, rural and island cultures in contrast to metropolitan culture

What makes McCulloch's book most valuable for Modernists... is not a new theory of Modernism but an astute analysis of the ways Scottish Modernists developed distinct, if parallel, techniques with culturally specific materials and sources. She manages this massive project through sustained argument for innovation and experimental technique joined with summary, commentary and interpretation of authors whose work has been left out of accounts of 'British' Modernism and often even Scottish criticism. The result is a major challenge to traditional analyses of Modernism and a significant intervention in the 'New Modernism' of the past decade. Review of English Studies What makes McCulloch's book most valuable for Modernists... is not a new theory of Modernism but an astute analysis of the ways Scottish Modernists developed distinct, if parallel, techniques with culturally specific materials and sources. She manages this massive project through sustained argument for innovation and experimental technique joined with summary, commentary and interpretation of authors whose work has been left out of accounts of 'British' Modernism and often even Scottish criticism. The result is a major challenge to traditional analyses of Modernism and a significant intervention in the 'New Modernism' of the past decade.

Margery Palmer McCulloch is Senior Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is co-editor of Scottish Literary Review. Her recent books include Modernism and Nationalism: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance, and Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2009.