Novel in Scotland
There was a tradition of moral and domestic fiction in the early nineteenth century that included the work of Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton and Christian Johnstone.
In the mid-nineteenth century major literary figures that contributed to the development of the novel included David Macbeth Moir, John Stuart Blackie, William Edmondstoune Aytoun and Margaret Oliphant.
In the late nineteenth century, a number of Scottish-born authors achieved international reputations, including Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories helped found the tradition of detective fiction.
Figures associated with the movement include Ian Maclaren, S. R. Crockett and J. M. Barrie, best known for his creation of Peter Pan, which helped develop the genre of fantasy, as did the work of George MacDonald.
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.
From the 1980s Scottish literature enjoyed another major revival, with figures including Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, Iain Banks, Candia McWilliam, Frank Kuppner and Andrew O'Hagan.
[3] Other eighteenth-century novelists included Henry Mackenzie (1745–1821), whose major work The Man of Feeling (1771) was a sentimental novel dealing with human emotions, influenced by Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne and the thinking of philosopher David Hume.
Having begun as a ballad collector and poet, his first prose work, Waverley in 1814, often called the first historical novel, launched a highly successful career as a novelist.
His work helped to solidify the respectability of the novel as literature[10] and did more than any other figure to define and popularise Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century.
[13][14] The major figures that benefited from this boom included James Hogg (1770–1835), whose best known work is The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which dealt with the themes of Presbyterian religion and Satanic possession, evoking the landscape of Edinburgh and its surrounding environment.
[16] The lawyer and critic John Wilson, as Christopher North, published novels including Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822), The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay (1823) and The Foresters (1825), which investigate individual psychology.
[17] The only major female novelist to emerge in the aftermath of Scott's success was Susan Ferrier (1782–1854), whose novels Marriage (1818), The Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831), continued the domestic tradition.
[8] In the mid-nineteenth century major literary figures that contributed to the development of the novel included David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851), John Stuart Blackie (1809–95) and William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813–65).
[16] Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) produced over a hundred novels, many of them historical or studies of manners set in Scotland and England,[18] including The Minister's Wife (1886) and Kirsteen (1890).
Robert Louis Stevenson's (1850–94) work included the urban Gothic novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which explored the psychological consequences of modernity.
Figures associated with the movement include Ian Maclaren (1850–1907), S. R. Crockett (1859–1914) and most famously J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), best known for his creation of Peter Pan, which helped develop the genre of fantasy.
[18] 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.
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).
In its early stages the movement was mainly focused on poetry, but increasingly concentrated on the novel, particularly after the 1930s when its major figure Hugh MacDiarmid was living in isolation in Shetland and its leadership moved to novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973).
[20] 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.
[1] 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,[21] He was the most translated Scottish author in the twentieth century.
[20] 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).
[20] 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,[20] Irvine Welsh's (b.
[1] 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).
[20] Scottish crime fiction, known as Tartan Noir,[23] has been a major area of growth with the success of novelists including Frederic Lindsay (1933–2013), Quintin Jardine (b.
