‘East is West and West is East’: Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Quest for Ultimate Cosmopolitanism

Lyall, Scott

Abstract

This chapter addresses Lewis Grassic Gibbon's quest to shatter the colonial conception of East and West and return to an age of cosmopolitanism. His idealistic model of a cosmopolitan future is deeply informed by his reading of the past as adapted from diffusionism. The narrator of Gibbon's Egyptian work is a White Russian in exile from the Bolshevik Revolution. ‘Revolt’ concludes with ibn Saud's refusal of the stereotype of violent native. Finding Clare Caldon's lost and vulnerable young daughter in the bazaar, with whom he shares a feeling of instinctual affiliation, and being told of Hassan's death, he calls off the nationalist revolt. Gibbon's cosmopolitanism, the national ‘synthesis’ envisioned at the end of The Lost Trumpet, is utopian, but it is also a necessary quest to escape provincialism and imagine a new anti-imperial universalism that is ultimately postcolonial.

Citation

Lyall, S. (2011). ‘East is West and West is East’: Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Quest for Ultimate Cosmopolitanism. In M. Gardiner, G. Macdonald, & N. O'Gallagher (Eds.), Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives (136-146). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637744.003.0010

• Publication Date: Jun 13, 2011
• Deposit Date: Apr 25, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 24, 2021
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 136-146
• Book Title: Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives
• ISBN: 9780748637744
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637744.003.0010
• Keywords: "Lewis Grassic Gibbon"; East; West; cosmopolitanism; nationalism; provincialism; post-colonialism
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/5238