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Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange Margery Palmer McCulloch This is the first book to present a study of Scottish literature in the post-1918 period as a Scottish manifestation of early twentieth-century literary modernism. It shows how this literature was influenced by European modernism and was rooted in the desire to regain a self-determining national identity for Scotland both culturally and politically. The book outlines a Scottish modernism which, from its beginnings, brought together the aesthetic and political in its artistic work. It shows how in Scottish modernism the Scots language was regenerated as a modernist literary language by Hugh MacDiarmid and Sydney Goodsir Smith in poetry and Lewis Grassic Gibbon in fiction in order to create a literature relevant to the changing modern world. Similarly, a chapter on women in the modern world shows how women writers re-made literary forms in order to bring women's perspectives into modern fiction. Other topics include the replacing of Scott's romantic Highlands by a presentation of Highland history and the actuality of the present informed by the ideas of Jung and Bergson and the writings of Proust, and a city fiction which brings together littérature engagée and modernist form. An extension of the period to 1959 allows a consideration of late modernism in the final poetry of Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid as well as a second phase of Scottish modernism in the new voices of the neglected 1940s and 1950s. Scottish writing in the post-World War One period has most often been presented solely in a national context. This new study takes it on to the international stage. Dr Margery Palmer McCulloch is Senior Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow and Co-editor of the scholarly journal Scottish Literary Review.

Note biographique

Margery Palmer McCulloch is Senior Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is co-editor of Scottish Literary Review. Her recent books include Modernism and Nationalism: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance, and Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2009.

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