Scottish Literature

Three 18th-century poets used the Scots vernacular and restored a true national literary tradition. Allan Ramsay, a poet in his own right, through his anthologies The Tea-Table Miscellany (4 volumes, 1724-1737) and The Ever Green (2 volumes, 1724), made the work of the makars and later Scottish poetry known to his contemporaries. Robert Fergusson was one of a line of 18th-century Scottish poets that continues to the present day, devoted to sympathetic but realistic evocations of Glasgow and Edinburgh. “Auld Reekie” is one of his many lively descriptions of Edinburgh streets and citizens. Robert Burns, the most beloved of all Scottish poets, refused to turn to English for his poetry; the bulk of his work is therefore squarely in the Scottish tradition, in language, forms (based to a large extent on folk poetry), and content.

Up to the time of Sir Walter Scott, one of the most popular and prolific of all novelists, prose writing in Scotland (in Scots or in English) served mainly didactic purposes, as with the work of the religious reformer John Knox. A fiction tradition emerged with Scott's Waverley novels (1814-1819), enlarged by such writers as 19th-century novelists Susan Ferrier and John Galt. Ferrier wrote three novels, the first of which, Marriage (1818), is also the first social novel in Scotland; it is remarkable for its sharply witty descriptions contrasting life in the Highlands with that in London. Galt's novels include The Annals of the Parish (1821), a realistic account of the daily life of a rural minister, and The Entail (1842), a study of obsession, notable for its picture of 18th-century Glasgow.

Certain novelists and poets of the later 19th century, because of their idyllic re-creations of couthie (comfortable) Scottish rural life, have been dubbed the “kailyard” (cabbage patch) school by 20th-century critics. The antithesis of this is found in The House with the Green Shutters (1901), the only novel of George Douglas (pseudonym of George Douglas Brown), which is a mordant exposé of small-town life and family tragedy. Another honest treatment of Scottish life is the trilogy A Scots Quair (1932-1934) by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell). This often lyrical story of a Scottish woman's transition from farm to city life is told in her own voice; syntax and vocabulary re-create the Fifeshire dialect. The first part of the trilogy, Sunset Song (1932), was dramatized for television.

Later writers of fiction include Neil M. Gunn, who portrayed life in the fishing villages of his native Caithness, as in Morning Tide (1931) and The Silver Darlings (1941); Robin Jenkins, whose several novels include Happy for the Child (1953) and Fergus Lamont (1969), the story of a Scot's search for identity; and Alasdair Gray, author of the wildly inventive novels Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and Janine, 1982 (1984), in the form of a long interior monologue, which manages to connect a man's fantasies with real events in his life. Gray's Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1984) continues his playful, allegorical approach.

As in the past, the bulk of significant modern Scottish literature continues to be poetry. The two most distinguished Scottish poets of the earlier part of the century were Edwin Muir, whose poetry was inspired by memories of his Orkney childhood and by allegory, and Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of C. M. Grieve), whose work was an expression of impassioned nationalism and socialist political views. MacDiarmid, leader of the so-called Scottish renaissance, attempted to revive a true Scottish poetry and the use of a Scots vocabulary. Their followers, writing both in Scots and in English, include 20th-century writers Robert Garioch and Norman McCaig, city poets in the Fergusson vein; Sydney Goodsir Smith; and George Mackay Brown, whose verse and prose, as in An Orkney Tapestry (1969), draw on his native landscape and legend. Douglas Dunn's several volumes of verse include Terry Street (1969) and Elegies (1985). His short stories, some of which have been published in the New Yorker, have been collected in Secret Villages (1985); they subtly indicate the adjustments of modern Scots to their changing social conditions. A scholar and critic as well, Dunn has edited The Poetry of Scotland (1980).