The Scottish Renaissance (; ) was a mainly literary movement of the early to mid-20th century that can be seen as the Scottish version of modernism. It is sometimes referred to as the Scottish literary renaissance, although its influence went beyond literature into music, drama, visual arts, and politics (among other fields). Key figures, like Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean and other writers and artists of the Scottish Renaissance displayed a profound interest in both modern philosophy and technology, as well as incorporating folk influences, and a strong concern for the fate of Scotland's declining languages.
It has been seen as a parallel to other movements elsewhere, including the Irish Literary Revival, the Harlem Renaissance (in the United States), the Bengal Renaissance (in Kolkata, India) and the Jindyworobak Movement (in Australia), which emphasised indigenous folk traditions.
Beginnings The term "Scottish Renaissance" was brought into critical prominence by the French Languedoc poet and scholar Denis Saurat in his article "", which was published in the in April 1924.I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 839. The term had appeared much earlier, however, in the work of the polymathic Patrick GeddesP. Geddes, The Scots Renascence, in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, Spring 1895, Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh and in a 1922 book review by Christopher Murray Grieve ("Hugh MacDiarmid") for the Scottish Chapbook that predicted a "Scottish Renascence as swift and irresistible as was the Belgian Revival between 1880 and 1910",Quoted in Margery Palmer McCulloch, ed., Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004. 52-53. involving such figures as Lewis Spence and Marion Angus.I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995), p. 839.
These earlier references make clear the connections between the Scottish Renaissance and the Celtic Twilight and Celtic Revival movements of the late 19th century, which helped reawaken a spirit of cultural nationalism among Scots of the modernist generations. Where these earlier movements had been steeped in a sentimental and nostalgic Celticism, however, the modernist-influenced Renaissance would seek a rebirth of Scottish national culture that would both look back to the medieval "makar" poets, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, as well as look towards such contemporary influences as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence, or (more locally) R. B. Cunninghame Graham.D. Daiches ed., The Penguin Companion to Literature 1 (1971) p. 333.
The turn of the 20th century saw the first stirrings of a new era in Scottish arts and letters. As writers such as George Douglas Brown railed against the "Kailyard school" that had come to dominate Scottish letters, producing satiric, realist accounts of Scottish rural life in novels like The House with the Green Shutters (1901), Scots language poets such as Violet Jacob and Marion Angus undertook a quiet revival of regionally inflected poetry in the Lowland vernacular. Patrick Geddes would continue his foundational work in civic renewal and town and regional planning, developing the triad "Place - Work - Folk" as a matrix for new thinking about the relationships between people and their local environments. In the realm of visual arts, John Duncan would refine his Celtic myth inspired Symbolist painting to include an increasing emphasis on collage and the flatness of the image. In architecture and the decorative arts, the towering figures of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Four would give Scotland its very own "school" of modern design and help create the "Glasgow style". Scotland in the early 20th century was experiencing an efflorescence of creative activity, but there was not yet a sense of a particular shared movement or an overt national inflection to all of this artistic effort.
Literary renaissance
It was not until the literary efforts of Hugh MacDiarmid that the Scottish Renaissance can properly be said to have begun. Starting in 1920, C. M. Grieve (having not yet adopted his nom de plume of Hugh MacDiarmid) began publishing a series of three short anthologies entitled Northern Numbers: Being Representative Selections from Certain Living Scottish Poets (including works by John Buchan, Violet Jacob, Neil Munro, and Grieve himself). These anthologies, which appeared one each year from 1920–22, along with his founding and editing of the Scottish Chapbook review (in the annus mirabilis of Modernism, 1922), established Grieve/MacDiarmid as the father and central figure of the burgeoning Scottish Renaissance movement that he had prophesied.D. Daiches ed., The Penguin Companion to Literature 1 (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 333. By about 1925, MacDiarmid had largely abandoned his English language poetry and began to write in a kind of "synthetic Scots" known as Lallans, that was a hybrid of regional Scots dialects and lexicographical artifacts exhumed from Jamieson's Dictionary of the Scottish Language, often grafted onto a Standard English grammatical structure. His poetic works included "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" (1926). This had an electrifying effect on the literary landscape of the time.D. Daiches ed., The Penguin Companion to Literature 1 (London: Penguin, 1971) p. 333.
Other writers soon followed in MacDiarmid's footsteps and also wrote in Lallans, including the poets Edwin Muir (1887–1959) and William Soutar (1898–1943), who pursued an exploration of identity, rejecting nostalgia and parochialism and engaging with social and political issues. Some writers that emerged after the Second World War followed MacDiarmid by writing in Scots, including Robert Garioch (1909–1981) and Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–1975). The Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) became known for translations of works from a wide range of European languages. He was also the first Scots Makar (the official national poet), appointed by the inaugural Scottish government in 2004. Alexander Gray was an academic and poet, but is chiefly remembered for his translations into Scots from the German and Danish ballad traditions into Scots, including Arrows. A Book of German Ballads and Folksongs Attempted in Scots (1932) and Four-and-Forty. A Selection of Danish Ballads Presented in Scots (1954).J. Corbett, Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation Into Scots (Multilingual Matters, 1999), , pp. 161-4.
The Scottish Renaissance increasingly concentrated on the novel, particularly after the 1930s when Hugh MacDiarmid was in isolation in Shetland and its leadership moved to novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973). Gunn's novels, beginning with The Grey Coast (1926), and including Highland River (1937) and The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1943), were largely written in English and not the Scots preferred by MacDiarmid, focused on the Highlands of his birth and were notable for their narrative experimentation. Other major figures associated with the movement include George Blake (1893–1961), A. J. Cronin (1896–1981), Eric Linklater (1899–1974) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901–35). There were also a large number of female authors associated with the movement, who demonstrated a growing feminine consciousness. They included Catherine Carswell (1879–1946), Willa Muir (1890–1970), Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) and most prolifically Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999). All were born within a fifteen-year period and, although they cannot be described as members of a single school, they all pursued an exploration of identity, rejecting nostalgia and parochialism and engaging with social and political issues. Physician A. J. Cronin is now often seen as sentimental, but his early work, particularly his first novel Hatter's Castle (1931) and his most successful The Citadel (1937) were a deliberate reaction against the Kailyard tradition, exposing the hardships and vicissitudes of the lives of ordinary people,R. Crawford, Scotland's Books: a History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), , p. 587. He was the most translated Scottish author in the twentieth century.P. Barnaby and T. Hubbard, "The international reception and impact of Scottish literature of the period since 1918", in I. Brown, ed., The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: Modern transformations: new identities (from 1918) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), , p. 32. George Blake pioneered the exploration of the experiences of the working class in his major works such as The Shipbuilders (1935). Eric Linklater produced comedies of the absurd including Juan in America (1931) dealing with prohibition America, and a critique of modern war in Private Angelo (1946). Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, produced one of the most important realisations of the ideas of the Scottish Renaissance in his trilogy A Scots Quair (Sunset Song, 1932, Cloud Howe, 1933 and Grey Granite, 1934), which mixed different Scots dialects with the narrative voice.C. Craig, "Culture: modern times (1914-): the novel", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), , pp. 157-9. Other works that investigated the working class included James Barke's (1905–58), Major Operation (1936) and The Land of the Leal (1939) and J. F. Hendry's (1912–86) Fernie Brae (1947).
The parallel revitalisation of Gaelic poetry, known as the Scottish Gaelic Renaissance, was largely due to the work of Sorley Maclean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain, 1911–96). A native of Skye and a native Gaelic speaker, he abandoned the stylistic conventions of the tradition and opened up new possibilities for composition with his poem (Poems to Eimhir, 1943). His work inspired a new generation to take up (the new poetry). These included George Campbell Hay (, 1915–1984), Lewis-born poets Derick Thomson (, 1921–2012) and Iain Crichton Smith (, 1928–98). They all focused on the issues of exile, the fate of the Gaelic language and bi-culturalism.J. MacDonald, "Gaelic literature" in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), , pp. 255-7.
In the 1950s, the review magazine Jabberwock, produced by students at the University of Edinburgh, became a significant vehicle of the Scottish Literary Renaissance.About The Jabberwock, The University of Edinburgh Information Services, :Library
Art
The ideas of a distinctive modern Scottish art were expressed in the inter-war period by figures including Stanley Cursiter (1887–1976), William McCance (1894–1970), William Johnstone (1897–1981) and J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961).D. Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460-1990 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990), , p. 348. Stanley Cursiter was influenced by the Celtic revival, post-impressionism and Futurism, as can be seen in his Rain on Princes Street (1913) and Regatta (1913). He went on to be a major painter of the coastline of his native Orkney, director of the National Gallery of Scotland and proposed the creation of a National Gallery of Modern Art in 1930.M. MacDonald, Scottish Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), , pp. 163-4. Fergusson was one of the few British artists who could claim to have played a part in the creation of modernism and probably played a major part in the formulation of MacDiarmid's thought. His interest in machine imagery can be seen in paintings like Damaged Destroyer (1918). He co-operated with MacDiarmid on the journal Scottish Art and Letters and MacDiarmid quoted extensively from his work.D. Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460-1990 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990), , p. 350.