In a review article in the Athenaeum in 1919 T. S. Eliot posed the question ‘Was there a Scottish literature?’, rapidly concluding that there was not, since Scotland had neither a single language nor a sufficiently unfragmented literary history to entitle it to claim what he called a distinctive ‘Scotch literature’. If Eliot were alive today, his question might well be ‘Was there a Scottish modernism?’; and many academic scholars and critics – Scottish as well as non-Scottish – would probably join him in doubting that there was any such thing. A perusal of critical studies of modernism in the past twenty to thirty years, including the most recent, will rarely reveal a listing of ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ in their indexes, while the potential Scottish modernist territory as a whole remains unexplored. Similarly, studies of early twentieth-century writing in Scotland seldom have the word ‘modernism’ in their indexes. On the surface, then, it might appear that there was no manifestation of literary modernism worthy of discussion in that part of the United Kingdom which in the early twentieth century was still called North Britain.

This study starts from the dual premise that there was and still is a varied and distinctive Scottish literature interacting with both traditional and international influences; and that there was in the post-1918 period a Scottish literary modernism drawing on artistic influences from European modernism and rooted in the desire to recover a self-determining identity for Scotland both culturally and politically.