Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism
- Part I Transforming Traditions
- Part II Ideology and Literature
- 5 Whither Scotland? Politics and Society between the Wars
- 6 Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands
- 7 Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City Fiction
- 8 Poetry and Politics
- Part III World War Two and its Aftermath
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
6 - Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands
from Part II - Ideology and Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Modernism and Scottish Modernism
- Part I Transforming Traditions
- Part II Ideology and Literature
- 5 Whither Scotland? Politics and Society between the Wars
- 6 Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands
- 7 Modernism and Littérature Engagée: A Scots Quair and City Fiction
- 8 Poetry and Politics
- Part III World War Two and its Aftermath
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
Summary
A story could have been made of all this for the scholars, but in Kenn's time no teacher ever attempted it. The Vikings were a people like the Celts or the Picts, concerning whom a few facts had to be memorized. But these facts were really very difficult to memorize, because they had no bearing on anything tangible. They were sounds in the empty spaces of history.
Neil M. Gunn, Highland River (1937)As discussed previously, Neil M. Gunn first came to attention as a short fiction writer, contributing stories to MacDiarmid's Scottish Nation and Northern Review magazines, and with his first novel The Grey Coast being praised by MacDiarmid as ‘something new, and big, in Scottish Literature’. A new way forward came with his third novel Morning Tide which was adopted as a Book Society Choice in late 1930. As with The Grey Coast, the social and economic context of the narrative is one of decline – the fishing is no longer profitable, the young men are emigrating and Old Hector is the only piper left in the village – but such decline is presented obliquely as a result of the narrative focus on the boy Hugh, the central character and the ‘eyes’ of the novel whose positive responses to his child's world bring the reader new perspectives on the grey coast.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959Literature National Identity and Cultural Exchange, pp. 113 - 130Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009