This chapter examines the way critics of Scottish literary culture have tended historically to read revival as a sign of the cultural health or ill-health of the nation, consequently pathologising the literary culture and limiting the terms of critical engagement with revival in relation to literary and artistic practices of the period. A key influence here is Tom Nairn, who sees the Scottish Renaissance as in large measure a response to the pathologies of ‘national culture’, with MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) being for Nairn ‘that great national poem on the impossibility of nationalism’ in a stateless, ‘nationalism-less’, nation. However, for Lyall, recent revisionist criticism, much of it influenced by Nairn, does not really reverse this trend, despite claiming to do so. If revival and renaissance are caught, as Lyall argues, in the ineluctable alliance of decline and rebirth, so too, in some measure, are critical responses to revival. To emerge from this may require a more global and comparative critical perspective. Key critics discussed include: Patrick Geddes, Hugh MacDiarmid, Kurt Wittig, David Craig, George Bruce, Frances Russell Hart, Robert Crawford, Gerard Carruthers, Margery Palmer McCulloch, Cairns Craig, Michael Shaw, and Scott Hames.
Citation
Lyall, S. The Health of the Nation: Critical Pathologies of the Long Scottish Revival. In The Scottish Literary and Cultural Revival, 1880s–1950s. Edinburgh University Press
Deposit Date
Mar 4, 2025
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed
Peer Reviewed
Book Title
The Scottish Literary and Cultural Revival, 1880s–1950s
