Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Gaelic Tradition up to 1750
- 2 Scottish Women Writers C.1560-C.1650
- 3 Old Singing Women and the Canons of Scottish Balladry and Song
- 4 Women and Song 1750-1850
- 5 Selves and Others: Non-fiction Writing in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
- 6 Burns’s Sister
- 7 ‘Kept some steps behind him’: Women in Scotland 1780-1920
- 8 Some Early Travellers
- 9 From Here to Alterity: The Geography of Femininity in the Poetry of Joanna Baillie
- 10 Some Women of the Nineteenth-century Scottish Theatre: Joanna Baillie, Frances Wright and Helen MacGregor
- 11 The Other Great Unknowns: Women Fiction Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century
- 12 Rediscovering Scottish Women’s Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
- 13 Elizabeth Grant
- 14 Viragos of the Periodical Press: Constance Gordon'Cumming, Charlotte Dempster, Margaret Oliphant, Christian Isohel Johnstone
- 15 Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Private Writing Career
- 16 Beyond ‘The Empire of the Gentle Heart’: Scottish Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century
- 17 What a Voice! Women, Repertoire and Loss in the Singing Tradition
- 18 Margaret Oliphant
- 19 Caught Between Worlds: The Fiction of Jane and Mary Findlater
- 20 Scottish Women Writers Abroad: The Canadian Experience
- 21 Women and Nation
- 22 Annie S. Swan and O. Douglas: Legacies of the Kailyard
- 23 Tales of Her Own Countries: Violet Jacob
- 24 Fictions of Development 1920-1970
- 25 Marion Angus and the Boundaries of Self
- 26 Catherine Carswell: Qpen the Door!
- 27 Willa Muir: Crossing the Genres
- 28 ‘To know Being': Substance and Spirit in the Work of Nan Shepherd
- 29 Twentieth-century Poetry I: Rachel Annand Taylor to Veronica Forrest-Thomson
- 30 More Than Merely Ourselves: Naomi Mitchison
- 31 The Modem Historical Tradition
- 32 Jane Duncan: The Homecoming of Imagination
- 33 Jessie Kesson
- 34 Scottish Women Dramatists Since 1945
- 35 The Remarkable Fictions of Muriel Spark
- 36 Vision and Space in Elspeth Davie's Fiction
- 37 Designer Kailyard
- 38 Twentieth-century Poetry II: The Last Twenty-five Years
- 39 Contemporary Fiction I: Tradition and Continuity
- 40 Contemporary Fiction II: Seven Writers in Scotland
- 41 Contemporary Fiction III: The Anglo-Scots
- 42 The Mirror and the Vamp: Liz Lochhead
- 43 Women's Writing in Scottish Gaelic Since 1750
- Select Bibliographies of Scottish Women Writers
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
37 - Designer Kailyard
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Gaelic Tradition up to 1750
- 2 Scottish Women Writers C.1560-C.1650
- 3 Old Singing Women and the Canons of Scottish Balladry and Song
- 4 Women and Song 1750-1850
- 5 Selves and Others: Non-fiction Writing in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
- 6 Burns’s Sister
- 7 ‘Kept some steps behind him’: Women in Scotland 1780-1920
- 8 Some Early Travellers
- 9 From Here to Alterity: The Geography of Femininity in the Poetry of Joanna Baillie
- 10 Some Women of the Nineteenth-century Scottish Theatre: Joanna Baillie, Frances Wright and Helen MacGregor
- 11 The Other Great Unknowns: Women Fiction Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century
- 12 Rediscovering Scottish Women’s Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
- 13 Elizabeth Grant
- 14 Viragos of the Periodical Press: Constance Gordon'Cumming, Charlotte Dempster, Margaret Oliphant, Christian Isohel Johnstone
- 15 Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Private Writing Career
- 16 Beyond ‘The Empire of the Gentle Heart’: Scottish Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century
- 17 What a Voice! Women, Repertoire and Loss in the Singing Tradition
- 18 Margaret Oliphant
- 19 Caught Between Worlds: The Fiction of Jane and Mary Findlater
- 20 Scottish Women Writers Abroad: The Canadian Experience
- 21 Women and Nation
- 22 Annie S. Swan and O. Douglas: Legacies of the Kailyard
- 23 Tales of Her Own Countries: Violet Jacob
- 24 Fictions of Development 1920-1970
- 25 Marion Angus and the Boundaries of Self
- 26 Catherine Carswell: Qpen the Door!
- 27 Willa Muir: Crossing the Genres
- 28 ‘To know Being': Substance and Spirit in the Work of Nan Shepherd
- 29 Twentieth-century Poetry I: Rachel Annand Taylor to Veronica Forrest-Thomson
- 30 More Than Merely Ourselves: Naomi Mitchison
- 31 The Modem Historical Tradition
- 32 Jane Duncan: The Homecoming of Imagination
- 33 Jessie Kesson
- 34 Scottish Women Dramatists Since 1945
- 35 The Remarkable Fictions of Muriel Spark
- 36 Vision and Space in Elspeth Davie's Fiction
- 37 Designer Kailyard
- 38 Twentieth-century Poetry II: The Last Twenty-five Years
- 39 Contemporary Fiction I: Tradition and Continuity
- 40 Contemporary Fiction II: Seven Writers in Scotland
- 41 Contemporary Fiction III: The Anglo-Scots
- 42 The Mirror and the Vamp: Liz Lochhead
- 43 Women's Writing in Scottish Gaelic Since 1750
- Select Bibliographies of Scottish Women Writers
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Of the many characteristics Scots have tried to find in themselves and in their country, little approximating to charm or sweetness is sought, found or regretted. An endemic brusqueness and rationality is widespread and assumed, while the scenery consistently rises above or falls below prettiness. The notion of sentimentality that ‘kailyard’ evokes is un-bosky, anti-Arcadian: a perverse nostalgia for thin comforts, a rather clodhopping gaiety, a less aspiring society, all this against a background of extreme physical beauty - an awkward and not entirely matching set of ideas, only in the last instance romantic. Yet its very meagreness, its contrariness, its persistence into the present day, carries a powerful appeal to a number of modern writers of romantic and light fiction, and, more to the point, their readers.
Today's Designer Kailyard does not emerge as a coherent and unified literary style but is, rather, a series of consumer-conscious stabs at intuited Scottishness on the part of some very different storytellers for whom Scotland is a deliberate, never a random setting, with bulky connotations that can be used but not ignored. In Kailyard, his study of the McLaren/Crockett/Barrie school, Ian Campbell notes, ‘The Kailyard looks back to a just vanished comfortable certainty: to read it from the cities, from overseas, is to be aware of something remembered at first hand … still fully credible, possibly discoverable in remote parts of Scotland’. The call of a dream certainty: for a romantic writer and her oeuvre this thing is bigger than both of them and, no creature of glade and bower, may turn wrecker if handled carelessly. Nourished by memories, first or second hand, of those who seek assurance above enlightenment, it is unevolved, unmalleable and market Jed.
On the reader's part there is a strong comfort factor in recognition. Even a non-native reader may find security in a parochial Scottish setting: neutered by diminutives, walled in by teacups, the cad does not flourish. Metropolitan philanderers are plucked out of their interiors and put down on moors or in manses, and so badly do the bogus, the egotistical and the unprincipled fare in the reader's immediate interpretation of this society that there can be little or no redemption for them until they submit to its values.
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- A History of Scottish Women's Writing , pp. 537 - 548Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020