NEIL M.

GUNN
The Scottish Literary Renaissance
 Neil M. Gunn
 Born Dunbeath, Caithness, 1891
 Died 1973
 Father herring fisherman
 Gunn worked as exciseman at
whisky distilleries before becoming
profesional writer

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

  Novels, plays, short stories, topical
articles.
 Fundamental in the Scottish Literary
Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s
 Key figure in merging of nationalist
groupings to form the Scottish
National Party

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 Key novels:
 The Grey Coast (1926)
 The Lost Glen (1928)
 Morning Tide (1930)
 The Poaching at Grianan (1930 as
serial in Scots Magazine) (2005)
 Sun Circle (1933)
 Butcher's Broom (1934)

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 Highland River (1937)
 Wild Geese Overhead (1939)
 Second Sight (1940)
 The Silver Darlings (1941) (filmed in
1947)
 Young Art and Old Hector (1942)
 The Serpent (1943)
 The Green Isle of the Great
Deep (1944)
 The Key of the Chest (1945)

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 Gunn was central to the revival in
Scottish letters which took place in
the 1920s and 30s and which came
to be known as the Scottish Literary
Renaissance, and his commitment
to Scottish culture and political
nationalism is a constant feature in
his writing.

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 The other main figure of the Scottish
Renaissance movement was, as we
have stated, the Langholm-born
Borderer Christopher Murray Grieve
who, although writing in prose
under his given name, used the
pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid for
his poetic alter-ego.

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 The term “Scottish Literary
Renaissance” was first used by the
French critic Saurat in his essay “Le
Group de la Renaissance Ecossaise”
in April 1924. Although Saurat
principally referred to C.M. Grieve
and Hugh MacDiarmid, whom he
believed to be two separate people,
the term was soon adopted by many
of the younger Scots writers of the
1920s and 1930s who saw a revival in
Scottish literature as being part of the
fight for an independent Scotland.

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

  MacDiarmid, although himself moving
away from the use of English in his own
poetry, supported Gunn’s use of Scottish
English, an English with peculiarly Scottish
characteristics and traditions. Gunn was,
according to MacDiarmid in his essay
“Neil Gunn and the Scottish Renaissance”,
the only writer of his time who shared his
(MacDiarmid’s) ideas on “how Scottish
Literature might be manoeuvred back into
an independent status based on its old
traditions but moving forward to cope
with the requirements of twentieth-century
life” (1973)

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 We base our belief in the possibility of
a great Scottish Literary Renaissance,
deriving its strength from the resources
that lie latent and almost
unsuspected in the Vernacular, upon
the fact that the genius of our
Vernacular enables us to secure with
comparative ease the very effects
and swift transitions which other
literatures are for the most part
unsuccessfully endeavouring to
cultivate in languages that have a
very different and inferior bias. (1923,
1984: 128-129)

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 Gunn had, like Joyce´s Stephen Dedalus,
been denied access to his historical
tongue, Gaelic, which had been
“usurped” by English. Forced to write in
the English language did not mean for
Gunn, having to form part of a specifically
English literary tradition. Instead he argued
that:
 (…) the Scottish writer choosing to use
English as the medium of communication
should be aware of his predecessors within
the Scottish tradition and, given that self-
awareness “his English will slowly find its
own significant pattern, as the Irishman
and the American has found his pattern.
(1992: 45)

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 In his essays written throughout the 1920s
and 1930s, Gunn continually evokes the
Irish ability to unite tradition with
modernity. This union was fundamental to
many of the writers who composed what
came to be known as the Scottish Literary
Renaissance in that it justified their self-
proclaimed historical role as, on the one
hand heirs to a historically rooted literary
tradition, and on the other hand justified
their declared intention of using the
stylistic and thematic bases of modernism
as a means of shaking Scotland out of her
post-Union lethargy and using literature as
a means of re-emphasising the particular
national identity which, they hoped,
would culminate in the recovery of
independence from the British state.

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 With respect to the concept of
tradition, Gunn shared Eliot’s view,
expressed in After Strange Gods,
that:
 (…) tradition involves all those
habitual actions, habits and
customs, from the most significant
religious rite to our conventional
way of greeting a stranger, which
represent the blood kinship of “the
same people living in the same
place”. (20)

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 With Eliot, Gunn believed that
tradition is, must be, a vital, living
concept which involves the
consciousness of “the historical
sense”, a sense which, as Eliot
stated in his essay “Tradition and the
Individual Talent”, involves:

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 (…) a perception, not only of the
pastness of the past, but of its
presence; the historical sense
compels a man to write not merely
with his own generation in his bones,
but with a feeling that the whole of
the literature of Europe from Homer
and within it the whole of the
literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order.

THE SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE

 It tak’s an almark like Joyce tae
write aboot Edinburgh. Edinburgh’ll
tak an almark like Joyce - a scaffie
like Joyce … it needs a Joyce tae
prick ilka pluke, tae miss nowt. I’d
glammoch her if I’d Joyce’s vir.
(1922: 70)

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