Scottish and International Modernisms

The twentieth-century Scottish renaissance - the literary and artistic revival which followed the end of the First World War - advanced a claim for a distinctive Scottish identity: cultural, political and national. Unlike earlier nineteenth-century Celtic revivals, this renaissance was both outward-looking and confidently contemporary; it embraced continental European influences as well as those of Anglophone writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Lawrence, and contributed to the development of what we now call modernism. This collection of essays, from fourteen scholars, illustrates the strongly international and modernist dimension of Scotland's interwar revival, and illuminates the relationships between Scottish and non-Scottish writers and contexts. It also includes two chapters on the contribution made to this revival by Scottish visual art and music.
These essays are based on papers originally presented at the 38th ASLS Annual Conference, 'Scottish and International Modernism', held at the University of Stirling, 6-7 June 2009.

Introduction ... Emma Dymock and Margery Palmer McCulloch Scotland and Modernism ... Roderick Watson Edwin Muir, Kafka and German Modernism ... Ritchie Robertson Modernity and Nationhood: 'Little Magazines' in Scotland ... Alistair McCleery Modernism, Magazines, and the Creation of an American Literature ... Mark Gaipa Edwin Muir and The New Age ... Alexander J. Cuthbert Primitivism in the Writing of D. H. Lawrence and Neil M. Gunn ... Andrew J. Sneddon W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid: Kingly Cousins ... Alan Riach On Cosmopolitanism and Late Style: Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Joyce ... Scott Lyall 'That Cry Alone Will Last': Scottish and European Perspectives in Sorley MacLean's An Cuilithionn ... Emma Dymock Willa Muir, Modernism and Gender ... Aileen Christianson Testing the Boundaries in Life and Literature: Catherine Carswell and Rebecca West ... Margery Palmer McCulloch From Portrait of a Young Scotsman to the Birth of Venus ... Jonathan Blackwood Modernism and Music in Scotland between the Wars ... John Purser Prismatic Modernities: Towards a Re-Contextualisation of Scottish Modernism ... Carla Sassi Contributors Index