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Kailyard Quotes

Browse 10 quotes about Kailyard.

Kailyard Quotes

“Still I maintain that in the Scotland of to-day there yet remain some types which differ from the types set forth by Kailyard novelists. Of course I know that virtue which has long left London and the South still lingers about Ecclefechan, I know a Scotsman is a grave sententious man, oppressed with the difficulty of the jargon he is bound to speak, and weighed down by the sense of being a North Briton. I know he prays to Mr. Gladstone and Jehovah, time about, finds his amusement in comparing preachers, can read and write, buys newspapers, tells stories about ministers, and generally deports himself in a manner which would land a weaker man in idiocy within a fortnight.”

ScotlandScotsmanKailyardEcclefechanWilliam Gladstone
Book:Success
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“A society beset by terrifying social problems was threatened by realism... exacerbated by the deep-seated evils of poverty and overcrowding generated by Scotland's pell-mell industrialisation. To expose these would be revolutionary; it would also break the discipline of puritanism by mentioning the unmentionable... The Kirk enforced silence out of conviction, the middle class out of fear. The bogus community of the Kailyard was an alternative to the horror of the real thing.”

Middle ClassScotlandSocial ProblemsIndustrialisationKailyardChurch Of Scotland
Book:Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707 to the Present
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“On the whole popular fiction in Victorian Scotland is not overwhelmingly backward-looking; it is not obsessed by rural themes; it does not shrink from urbanisation or its problems; it is not idyllic in its approach; it does not treat the common people as comic or quaint. The second half of the nineteenth century is not a period of creative trauma or linguistic decline; it is one of the richest and most vital episodes in the history of Scottish popular culture.”

Scots LanguageScots LeidKailyardScottish LiteratureScottish Fiction
Book:Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction and the Press
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“However harmful the kailyard tradition was to Scottish literature and the perception of Scotland, it invariably portrayed village or small town life in Scotland as harmonious and not umpleasant. At the beginning of the twentieth century, an anti-kailyard tradition of Scottish literature developed, most markedly represented by two novels: George Douglas Brown, 'The House with the Green Shutters (1901), and John MacDougall Hay, Gillespie (1914). Both were based on the authors' own experience of Scottish villages (Ochiltree and Tarbert respectively). Both display the unsavoury and tragic side of parochial life. Could we view The Little White Town of Never Weary as a sort of riposte to this tradition? It certainly emphasises the more idyllic traditional life of rural market town and burgh.”

Small Town LifeVillage Life1917KailyardScottish LiteratureGeorge Douglas BrownAnti KailyardJohn Macdougall Hay
Book:The Little White Town of Never Weary
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“It must have been soon after that when ways and means were much under discussion that Leslie and Ray came to see us in Wokingham. Leslie was working at high pressure on all sorts of subjects but although he was beginning to find his financial worries lessen he still seemed not to have found and in my opinion did not exactly know what he might be able to do best. I suggested that he wrote a great Scots drama or novel. With one voice Leslie and Ray said it would never pay. I protested that it would if it was good enough - that Scotland was gasping for a picture of the true Scotland as he and I knew it - a picture that was neither A House with the Green Shutters nor yet A Bonnie Briar Bush, neither of which to me rang true.”

ScotlandKailyardScottish LiteratureSunset SongJames Leslie Mitchell
Book:Another Song at Sunset: Jean Baxter, Scots poet and friend of Lewis Grassic Gibbon
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“Well, I suppose you have read the Green Shutters by this time. 'Tis a brutal and bloody work; too sinister, I should think, for a man of your kindlier disposition. There is too much black for the white in it. Even so, it is more complimentary to Scotland, I think, than the sentimental slop of Barrie and Crockett, and Maclaren. It was antagonism to their method that made me embitter the blackness; like old Gourlay I was "going to show the dogs what I thought of them." Which was a gross blunder, of course.”

KailyardGeorge Douglas BrownJ M Barrie1901Ian MaclarenS R Crockett
Author:George Douglas Brown
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“The Maggie [Alexander Mackendrick, 1954] represents Scotland at its most self-lacerative. Precisely at the moment, the early fifties, when the massive penetration of American capital into Scotland was gathering pace, The Maggie actually sets the two halves of the contradiction - american entrepreneur and Scottish workers in opposition to each other, but with almost wilful perversity the film has the Scots win hands down. In true Kailyard style, what is not achievable at the level of political struggle is attainable in the Scottish imagination.”

ScotlandKailyard1954American CapitalistsAlexander Mackendrick
Book:Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television
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