Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism
- Part I Transforming Traditions
- 1 Towards a Scottish Modernism: C. M. Grieve, Little Magazines and the Movement for Renewal
- 2 Hugh MacDiarmid and Modernist Poetry in Scots
- 3 Criticism and New Writing in English
- 4 Beyond this Limit: Women, Modernism and the Modern World
- Part II Ideology and Literature
- Part III World War Two and its Aftermath
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
3 - Criticism and New Writing in English
from Part I - Transforming Traditions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism
- Part I Transforming Traditions
- 1 Towards a Scottish Modernism: C. M. Grieve, Little Magazines and the Movement for Renewal
- 2 Hugh MacDiarmid and Modernist Poetry in Scots
- 3 Criticism and New Writing in English
- 4 Beyond this Limit: Women, Modernism and the Modern World
- Part II Ideology and Literature
- Part III World War Two and its Aftermath
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
Summary
There are two ways in which the writer may avoid being assimilated by the age; one is by struggling with it, the other is by escape […] But it is he who wrestles with the age who finally justifies both it and himself.
Edwin Muir, ‘The Zeit Geist’, Transition (1926)Although as editor, polemicist, and Scot-language poet MacDiarmid was the dominant presence in the early years of the revival movement, he was not the first of the new Scottish writers to engage publicly with the condition of modernity. In 1918, the Orkney-born Edwin Muir published (under the pseudonym of Edward Moore) We Moderns: a collection of what he called ‘aphorisms’, dedicated to A. R. Orage. These were short, polemical, ‘manifesto-like’ essays, and had originally appeared as a series in Orage's New Age to which Muir was a regular contributor. The success of the book in Britain and America resulted in Muir obtaining a contract with the American Freeman magazine which enabled him and his wife Willa to travel in Europe between 1921 and 1924, thus gaining first-hand knowledge of a cultural influence known previously only through print media, and especially through the articles published in the New Age. The Muirs' sojourn in Prague and Dresden also led to their acquiring the facility in German which later led to their translations of modernist writers such as Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959Literature National Identity and Cultural Exchange, pp. 53 - 67Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009