Distant Cousin Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Scots Quair (Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite) and Scottish Scene

A quarter of this monograph is devoted to Gibbon’s masterpiece, the trilogy A Scots Quair, approached as a strategically integrated volume. This chapter places the book within its contemporary context, using original research to focus authoritatively on the aims and ideals that shaped its social, political, cultural and philosophical achievement. Sunset Song garners greatest attention for its bespoke narrative techniques and for the eclectic deployment of literary influences from Scotland and elsewhere. The nostalgic power and moral impact of this first novel as a compelling bildungsroman and an elegy for the crofting society destroyed by the war feeds into the more overtly political character of the remaining parts of the trilogy. The revolutionary political perspective at the heart of the work is convincingly based on the author’s ready identification with the subaltern classes, marking it as the highest form of littérature engagée. The Gibbon contributions to Scottish Scene are considered in relation to the central achievement of the trilogy, with the Scottish stories replicating the author’s signature style and, in ‘Forsaken’, successfully carrying it to a more sophisticated level of stylistic experimentation. The polemical essays are welcomed for shedding light on the author’s ideas and beliefs, about literature, politics, history and religion.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon galvanized the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, the first novel of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair, that drew vividly upon his deprived upbringing on a small croft in Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century. Yet his literary legacy extends significantly beyond his breakout book. The seventeen volumes that he amassed in his short life, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, demonstrate his versatility, as historian, essayist, biographer and fiction writer. His corpus pays testimony to his core principles, rooted in his rural upbringing: his restless humanitarianism and his deep veneration for the natural world. Set against an informed conspectus of Mitchell’s life and times and incorporating substantive new source material, this study provides a comprehensive and searching analysis of the canon of a combative writer whose fame in recent years – as cultural nationalist, left-wing libertarian, proto-feminist, neo-romantic visionary and trailblazing modernist – has carried far beyond his native land. In tune with the intellectual climate of the inter-war years, Gibbon emerges as a passionate advocate of revolutionary political activism; in addition, as a profound believer in the overarching primacy of nature, he is represented as a supreme practitioner in the field of ecofiction. Coupled with his modernist experimentation with language and narrative, this firmly establishes him amongst the foremost fiction writers of the twentieth century – uniquely, a figure whose achievement has consistently won both critical and popular acclaim.

Scottish Literature and World War I

This work is the first book-length study of Scottish Great War literature. Rather than arguing the war exerted a singular influence on the country’s writing, the collection highlights the variety of literary, social, political, and philosophical reverberations of the war in Scotland literature. Part one of the collection presents multi-text case studies of nationalism, pastoralism, Scottish Great War prose, popular literature, women’s, letters to the editor, Gaelic writing, and philosophy. Part two contains essays devoted to individual authors, including canonical figures such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn and John Buchan, as well as peripheral authors such as George A. C. Mackinlay, Charles Murray and Ewart Alan Mackintosh.

Minor Modernisms: The Scottish Renaissance and the Translation of German-language Modernism

Germany has been epitomised in the twentieth century as Britain's main rival and adversary. Yet Scottish modernists were influenced by Germany and German-language modernism to think more internationally about their nation and work, a cultural encounter that took place largely in and through translation. Willa and Edwin Muir, who in the early 1920s stayed at educational modernist A. S. Neill's experimental school in Germany, translated German-language modernists such as Kafka and Broch. Hugh MacDiarmid utilised translations of Nietzsche to inform his call for a renascent Scotland. Lewis Grassic Gibbon would write Sunset Song after reading Gustav Frenssen's regional novel Jörn Uhl. Behind this lies the contention that the breakup of world empires, such as the British and Austro-Hungarian, occasioned minor modernisms (to adapt Deleuze and Guattari) such as that in Scotland, and that translation was central to the emergence, impact, and transnationality of the Scottish renaissance movement.

Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A Scots Quair—Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934). While the majority of critical attention has focused on this trilogy, Mitchell published a wide body of work, ranging from historical fiction to archaeological adventure to science fiction. His work often reflects a leftist, anarcho-socialist politics and a diffusionist worldview, in which modern civilization progressively distances humanity from a primitive, utopian state of being. Mitchell published seventeen books, fifteen between 1931 and 1934, before dying at the age of thirty-four.

Le skopos comme stratégie de déblocage : dialecte et scotticité dans Sunset Song de Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Résumé Le roman-culte de la trilogie écossaise de Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, paru en 1932, a résisté à la traduction en français pendant près de 70 ans, principalement à cause de son style : celui-ci est non seulement une écriture personnelle mais aussi un manifeste pour la valeur littéraire du dialecte écossais que l’auteur a intimement mêlé à l’anglais afin de créer une prose poétique écossaise unique. L’imitation du dialecte ou l’adaptation dans un dialecte francophone étant irréalisables, c’est la réflexion sur la fonction de la traduction française, par le biais de la théorie fonctionnaliste du skopos, qui a permis de définir la stratégie de traduction à utiliser.