Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
1 - The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
Summary
John Buchan's thrillers, from The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915 onwards, with his war histories, qualify him securely as a writer of modernity, depicting modern technologies in narratives predicated on speed, with an awareness of the modern reader's political and cultural environment. Yet this writing was the work of a middle-aged man, who arrived at this moment of modern creativity with a twenty-year career behind him. Buchan's writing was first published in 1893, and his first fiction was in the realist, Victorian tradition of the historical novel, beginning with Sir Quixote of the Moors in 1895. It is important to understand that Buchan first began to write in the tradition of Scottish historical fiction begun by Sir Walter Scott and continued in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and others: ‘most of John Buchan is to be found in Stevenson’. While Buchan was faithful to many of the principles set down by Scott, he also brought in, for instance, a new scepticism, in Sir Quixote (1895) and in A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899), that would be echoed in later fictions now recognised as expressing a completely modern refusal to offer contented closure in the novel: George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901) is a strong example. At the earlier end of the nineteenth century, Scott used historical fiction as a modern and satiric critique of Scottish history and Scotland's relationship with England and Empire.
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- Chapter
- Information
- John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity , pp. 17 - 32Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014