‘That ancient self’: Scottish Modernism’s Counter-Renaissance

Lyall, Scott

Abstract

This essay argues that the twentieth-century movement of literary and cultural revival known as the Scottish Renaissance was, like the Irish Revival lead by W.B. Yeats, a counter-Renaissance against the anti-national ideals of the Renaissance; it was also, somewhat paradoxically, a lament and a replacement for the Renaissance that Scotland supposedly did not have in the early modern period. While two of the main protagonists of the modern Renaissance, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, disagreed fundamentally over the future direction of Scottish letters, they both agreed that the Golden Age of Scottish literature occurred in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century period of Robert Henryson and William Dunbar. They, and others of the modern Renaissance, also agreed that the Reformation was a disaster for Scottish creativity. This historical pessimism of the Scottish Renaissance is related to its Modernist context.

Citation

Lyall, S. (2014). ‘That ancient self’: Scottish Modernism’s Counter-Renaissance. European Journal of English Studies, 18(1), 73-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2014.881106

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Mar 25, 2014
• Publication Date: Jan 2, 2014
• Deposit Date: Apr 24, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 24, 2014
• Print ISSN: 1382-5577
• Electronic ISSN: 1744-4233
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 73-85
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2014.881106
• Keywords: Scottish Renaissance; Hugh MacDiarmid; Edwin Muir; Robert Henryson; William Dunbar; Reformation; Modernism; Irish Literary Revival
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/6856
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2014.881106