Kailyard school

According to these critics, kailyard literature depicted an idealised version of rural Scottish life, and was typically unchallenging and sentimental.

Millar, though its editor William Ernest Henley was heavily implicated to have created the term.

[4] The name derives from the Scots "kailyaird" or "kailyard", which means a small cabbage patch (see Kale) or kitchen garden, usually adjacent to a cottage;[5] but more famously from Ian Maclaren's 1894 book Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush whose title alludes to the Jacobite song "There grows a bonnie brier bush in our kailyard".

[7] Criticism came from certain branches of the English literary establishment including T. W. H. Crosland and from fellow Scots such as George Douglas Brown who aimed his 1901 novel The House with the Green Shutters explicitly against what he called "the sentimental slop"[8] of the Kailyard school.

[9][10] Ian Carter has argued that the Kailyard school reflects a sentimental structure of feeling which has deep roots in Scottish literature and can be found in the works of Burns and Scott, and that the work of William Alexander and later Scottish Renaissance writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon can be seen as the assertion of a democratic structure of feeling which is in tension with it.