Literature in modern Scotland
Writers that emerged after the Second World War writing in Scots included Robert Garioch and Sydney Goodsir Smith.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of a new generation of Scottish poets that became leading figures on the UK stage, including Don Paterson, Robert Crawford, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay.
Among the most important novels of the early twentieth century was The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown, which broke with the Kailyard tradition.
Major figures included Neil Gunn, George Blake, A. J. Cronin, Eric Linklater and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
There were also a large number of female authors associated with the movement, who included Catherine Carswell, Willa Muir, Nan Shepherd and Naomi Mitchison.
Successful mass-market works included the action novels of Alistair MacLean and the historical fiction of Dorothy Dunnett.
Working class identity continued to be explored by Archie Hind, Alan Sharp, George Friel and William McIlvanney.
In the 1970s a large number of plays explored the nature of Scottish identity, including the work of Stewart Conn, Hector Macmillan, Bill Bryden and Roddy McMillan.
[2] Other writers that emerged in this period, and are often treated as part of the movement, include the poets Edwin Muir (1887–1959) and William Soutar (1898–1943), who pursued an exploration of identity, rejecting nostalgia and parochialism and engaging with social and political issues.
[2] Some writers that emerged after the Second World War followed MacDiarmid by writing in Scots, including Robert Garioch (1909–81) and Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–75).
1942), whose work has often seen a coming to terms with class and national identity within the formal structures of poetry and commenting on contemporary events, as in Barbarians (1979) and Northlight (1988).
[10] Among the most important novels of the early twentieth century was The House with the Green Shutters (1901) by George Douglas Brown (1869–1902), a realist work that broke with the Kailyard tradition to depict modern Scottish society, using Scots language and disregarding nostalgia.
[11] Also important was the work of John Buchan (1875–1940), who played a major role in the creation of the modern thriller with The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916).
His prolific output included the historical novel Witchwood (1927), set in seventeenth-century Scotland, and the posthumously published Sick Heart River (1941), a study of physiological breakdown in the wilderness of Canada (of which Buchan was governor general from 1936 until his death).
[3] The Scottish Renaissance increasingly concentrated on the novel, particularly after the 1930s when Hugh MacDiarmid was living in isolation in Shetland and its leadership moved to novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973).
[3] All were born within a fifteen-year period and, although they cannot be described as members of a single school, they all pursued an exploration of identity, rejecting nostalgia and parochialism and engaging with social and political issues.
[2] Physician A. J. Cronin is now often seen as sentimental, but his early work, particularly his first novel Hatter's Castle (1931) and his most successful The Citadel (1937) were a deliberate reaction against the Kailyard tradition, exposing the hardships and vicissitudes of the lives of ordinary people.
[2] Jenkins major novels such as The Cone Gatherers (1955), The Changeling (1958) and Fergus Lamont (1978) focused on working-class dilemmas in a world without spiritual consolation.
[3] Successful mass-market works included the action novels of Alistair MacLean (1922–87), and the historical fiction of Dorothy Dunnett (b.
[3] From the 1980s Scottish literature enjoyed another major revival, particularly associated with a group of Glasgow writers focused around meetings in the house of critic, poet and teacher Philip Hobsbaum (1932–2005).
[3] In the 1990s major, prize winning, Scottish novels that emerged from this movement included Gray's Poor Things (1992), which investigated the capitalist and imperial origins of Scotland in an inverted version of the Frankenstein myth,[3] Irvine Welsh's (b.
[2] These works were linked by a reaction to Thatcherism that was sometimes overtly political, and explored marginal areas of experience using vivid vernacular language (including expletives and Scots dialect).
[3] Scottish crime fiction, known as Tartan Noir,[14] has been a major area of growth with the success of novelists including Frederic Lindsay (1933–2013), Quintin Jardine (b.
Barrie is often linked to the Kailyard movement and his early plays such as Quality Street (1901) and The Admirable Crichton (1902) deal with temporary inversions of the normal social order.
As well as drawing on his medical experience, as in The Anatomist (1930), his plays included middle class satires such as The Sunlight Sonata (1928) and often called on biblical characters such as devils and angels, as in Mr. Bolfry (1943).
[20] The shift to drama that focused on working class life in the post-war period gained momentum with Robert McLeish's The Gorbals Story (1946), which dealt with the immense social problems of urban Scotland.
[28] Iain Moireach's plays also used humour to deal with serious subjects, as in Feumaidh Sinn a Bhith Gàireachdainn (We Have to Laugh, 1969), which focused on threats to the Gaelic language.
[29] The political and funding climate changed radically after the failure of the devolution referendum of 1979 and the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher.
The Scottish Arts Council encouraged theatre companies to function as business, finding funding in ticket sales and commercial sponsorship.
7:84 also encountered a period of financial instability, but new structures, new management and an emphasis on encouraging new writing led to works such as Rona Munro's (b.
