Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity, and Cultural Exchange

Margery Palmer McCulloch sees Scottish Modernism as both interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European Modernism and responding to the social, political, and cultural contexts of Scotland. She builds her argument through close readings of the new poetry and criticism of the 1920s and the interaction of politics and literature in the 1930s. She concentrates on the reimagining of the Highlands, women writers' response to the changing world of the Modernist period, and the continuing impact of Modernism in the poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. She discusses Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, the Muirs and the Carswells, Marion Angus, Naomi Mitchison, Nan Shepherd, Nancy Brysson Morrison, William Soutar, Sydney Goodsir Smith, and Robert Garioch, among others.