Scottish Renaissance
The writers and artists of the Scottish Renaissance displayed a profound interest in both modern philosophy and technology, as well as incorporating folk influences, and a strong concern for the fate of Scotland's declining languages.
Where these earlier movements had been steeped in a sentimental and nostalgic Celticism, however, the modernist-influenced Renaissance would seek a rebirth of Scottish national culture that would both look back to the medieval "makar" poets, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, as well as look towards such contemporary influences as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence, or (more locally) R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
As writers such as George Douglas Brown railed against the "Kailyard school" that had come to dominate Scottish letters, producing satiric, realist accounts of Scottish rural life in novels like The House with the Green Shutters (1901), Scots language poets such as Violet Jacob and Marion Angus undertook a quiet revival of regionally inflected poetry in the Lowland vernacular.
In the realm of visual arts, John Duncan would refine his Celtic myth inspired Symbolist painting to include an increasing emphasis on collage and the flatness of the image.
Scotland in the early 20th century was experiencing an efflorescence of creative activity, but there was not yet a sense of a particular shared movement or an overt national inflection to all of this artistic effort.
[7] Other writers soon followed in MacDiarmid's footsteps and also wrote in Lallans, including 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.
[8] Some writers that emerged after the Second World War followed MacDiarmid by writing in Scots, including Robert Garioch (1909–1981) and Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–1975).
[10] The Scottish Renaissance increasingly concentrated on the novel, particularly after the 1930s when Hugh MacDiarmid was in isolation in Shetland and its leadership moved to novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973).
[11] 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.
[8] 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,[12] He was the most translated Scottish author in the twentieth century.
After World War I he moved to London with his wife, fellow student Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980), where he joined the same circles as Fergusson, vorticist Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) and nationalist composer Francis George Scott.
Both were influenced by surrealism and the work of Bruegel and focused on landscape, as can be seen in McIntosh Patrick's Traquair House (1938) and more overtly Baird's The Birth of Venus (1934).
This latter production, with Duncan Macrae in the title role, is generally regarded as the one which confirmed McLellan's reputation as a comic dramatist of substance in Scots.
[24] The production of another historical Scots comedy, The Bogle, was delayed by the Second World War, eventually being staged as Torwatletie by Glasgow Unity Theatre in 1946.
McLellan had written The Flouers o' Edinburgh (1947) in the expectation that it would be produced by the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow but the play was rejected by James Bridie, who was concerned about its overtly nationalist reading of Scottish history.
[27] His Let Wives Tak Tent, a rendering into Scots of Molière's L'Ecole des femmes, was first produced at the Gateway Theatre in 1948, with Duncan Macrae in the lead role.
[28] In the same year, his adaptation of David Lyndsay's Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis was staged at the Church of Scotland's Assembly Hall as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.
Together with Lennox Milne and Tom Fleming, Kemp founded the Gateway Theatre Company in 1953, taking on the roles of Chairman and resident playwright.
[29] His two best-known plays are The Lass wi' the Muckle Mou (1950), which drew on the legend of Thomas the Rhymer, and The Warld's Wonder (1953), about the mathematician and reputed magician Michael Scot.
[36] The influence of modernism can also be heard in the work of Erik Chisholm (1904–1965) in his Pibroch Piano Concerto (1930) and the Straloch suite for Orchestra (1933) and the sonata An Riobhan Dearg (1939).
He was also instrumental in the foundation of the Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music, for which he brought leading composers to Glasgow to perform their work.
