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Scottish Literature Quotes

Browse 9 quotes about Scottish Literature.

Scottish Literature Quotes

“Refusing to collaborate with a transendental, totalising and finally determining sense of national identity, Scottish novelists since the 1980s have concentrated instead on individual moments of crisis, alienation and fragmentation, moments dramatising the loss and discovery of self, as they are articulated through the lives of some of thos conventionally excluded from the story of Scotland.”

Self DiscoveryScotlandAlienationExcludedScottish LiteratureScottish Novelists
Book:Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present
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“In the complexity of its structure, its kaleidoscope of perspectives, its confrontation with the effects of the First World War, its attentiveness to experience at all life stages and it embrace of linguistic, formal and philosophical 'difficulty', The Weatherhouse is arguably the great Scottish modernist feminist novel of the period.”

FeminismModernismFirst World WarLife StagesScottish LiteratureNan ShepherdThe Weatherhouse
Book:The International Companion to the Scottish Novel
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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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“Historically, the language we call Scots was a development of the Anglian speech of the Northumbrians who established their kingdom of Bernicia as far north as the Firth of Forth in the seventh century. This northern Anglo-Saxon language flourished in Lowland Scotland and emerged into a distinct language on its own, capable of rich expansion by borrowing from Latin, French and other sources with its own grammatical forms and methods of borrowing. By the time of the Makars of the fifteenth century it was a highly sophisticated poetic language, based on the spoken speech of the people, but enriched by many kinds of expansion, invention and 'aureation'. Distinct from literary English, but having much in common with it, literary Scots took its place in the late Middle Ages as one of the great literary languages of Europe.”

Scots LanguageScots LeidScottish LiteratureBernicia
Book:Literature and Gentility in Scotland
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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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