Graham Stephen
Published: 21 January 2019
The dominance of MacDiarmid and Gibbon in The Scottish Literary Renaissance of the early twentieth century has obscured a network of creative North-East minds who were instrumental in the movement’s development.
University of Aberdeen
The dominance of MacDiarmid and Gibbon in The Scottish Literary Renaissance of the early twentieth century has obscured a network of creative North-East minds who were instrumental in the movement’s development.
By considering the roles played by peripheral figures such as Nan Shepherd, Fionn Maccolla, Helen Cruickshank, Charles Murray, Iain Macpherson and others my research will offer an expanded and connective insight into the North-East’s influence. My research will examine the changes that modernity brought to the area and the distinct literary identity which influenced and inspired its writers. Innovations which North-East writing established to define and protect its separate identity and its intimate identification with the ‘land’ became keystones of twentieth century Scottish literature.
By tracing this relationship and comparison of writers’ differing modes of expression I will examine the sense of belonging, and longing for, this landscape that can be detected in their work, often from places of self-imposed exile.By applying a social and cultural history approach to a topic more generally analysed in a purely literary manner I hope to extend our understanding of how modernity facilitated the shared influences which underpinned the development of the renaissance in a local and national context.
First published: 21 January 2019