Introduction: ‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel

Lyall, Scott

Abstract

While ‘community’ as a concept has come under increasing attack in a neoliberal era, it has remained in Scotland a mythic, though not unexamined, signifier of resistance to perceived threats to national identity. Community, central to the Scottish novel since the Kailyard, continues to be a prevalent theme in the many important novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored here. Yet, while often disturbingly oppressive in tenor, many of these representations of community actually attack the myth of Scottish communalism to critique, and often expose as forms of madness, the conventional values of social class, capitalism, patriarchy, and religion.

Citation

Lyall, S. (2016). Introduction: ‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel. In S. Lyall (Ed.), Community in Modern Scottish Literature (1-24). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004317451_002

• Publication Date: 2016
• Deposit Date: May 20, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 31, 2016
• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 1-24
• Series Title: SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature
• Series ISSN: 1571-0734
• Book Title: Community in Modern Scottish Literature
• ISBN: 9789004317451
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004317451_002
• Keywords: Community; Scotland; myth; Kailyard; commercialism; The House with the Green Shutters; Calvinism; madness; class; Sunset Song; Imagined Corners; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; capitalism; Lanark; Trainspotting; Tales from the Mall; Scottish politics
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/10243