Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism
- Part I Transforming Traditions
- Part II Ideology and Literature
- 5 Whither Scotland? Politics and Society between the Wars
- 6 Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands
- 7 Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City Fiction
- 8 Poetry and Politics
- Part III World War Two and its Aftermath
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
7 - Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City Fiction
from Part II - Ideology and Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism
- Part I Transforming Traditions
- Part II Ideology and Literature
- 5 Whither Scotland? Politics and Society between the Wars
- 6 Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands
- 7 Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City Fiction
- 8 Poetry and Politics
- Part III World War Two and its Aftermath
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
Summary
[M]en are not merely the victims, the hapless leaves storm-blown, of historic forces, but may guide if they cannot generate that storm.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1934)In Scotland as elsewhere on the international scene, the 1930s saw political themes enter more overtly into creative writing alongside continuing indications of modernity. A new contender in this respect was Lewis Grassic Gibbon (born James Leslie Mitchell in 1901) who took Scotland's literary world by storm when Sunset Song, the first novel in his trilogy A Scots Quair, was published in 1932. Over the years since its publication, Sunset Song has become something of a cult book in the Scottish literary context, to a significant extent as a result of Gibbon's presentation of his heroine, Chris Guthrie, and the psychological tug-of-war she experiences between her love of her land and her native Scots tongue, and her love of learning and the English language that opens up new horizons for her mind:
So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you'd waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you'd cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies. You saw their faces in firelight, father’s and mother’s and the neighbours’, before the lamps lit up, tired and kind, faces dear and close to you, you wanted the words they’d known and used, forgotten in the far-off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart how they wrung it and held it, the toil of their days and unendingly their fight. And the next minute that passed from you, you were English, back to the English words so sharp and clean and true – for a while, for a while, till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959Literature National Identity and Cultural Exchange, pp. 131 - 153Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009