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OVERVIEW:
Themes and influences in Scottish literature
Contradictions and cross-currents
Robert Louis StevensonLike many other aspects of its culture, Scotland's literature is distinguished by a potent concentration of hybrid vigour. It’s no coincidence, for example, that one of western society’s most enduring modern symbols of duality, Jekyll and Hyde, was the creation of a Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94). Similarly emblematic is the fact that Stevenson (the son and grandson of two noted engineers; himself trained in engineering and law) was a Scottish author who spent much of his life abroad - in France, the US and ultimately in Samoa.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is nonetheless widely interpreted, on one level, as a metaphorical exploration of Stevenson’s native Edinburgh, where Presbyterian probity and illicit corruption have often existed cheek-by-jowl. The novel’s central character was partly inspired by a real-life 18th-century prototype, William Brodie, a deacon of the Scottish capital, whose outwardly respectable lifestyle belied his nocturnal career as a hard-drinking womaniser, gambler and burglar. Having rubbed shoulders in his time with such leading artistic contemporaries as the poet Robert Burns and the painter Sir Henry Raeburn, Brodie was eventually hanged, in 1788, from a new type of municipal gallows: a model of his own devising, fashioned in the interests of greater efficiency.
Penguin editionThe bundle of jostling contrasts, contradictions and cross-currents that lend Scottish literature its characteristic energy and attitude – a dialectic for which the 20th-century poet Hugh MacDiarmid co-opted the term 'Caledonian antisyzygy' – is so abundantly encapsulated in Stevenson’s life and work that he is frequently posited as Scotland’s quintessential literary representative.
Even in the brief thumbnail sketch above, we can see the synthesis of influences both local and international; from the worlds of both art and science. Then there’s realism and fantasy, good and evil, the visible and the concealed, high and low society, satire and solemnity. Historical consciousness is coupled with radical modernity, the vulgar with the metaphysical; the archetypal meets the highly particular. Elements of folklore are woven into elegant literary conceits, while a fascination with transgression is weighed against a resolute narrative trajectory of divinely-sanctioned – even poetic – comeuppance.
Oral and written traditions
In the Scots language, according to MacDiarmid, 'diverse attitudes of mind or shades of temper are telescoped into single words or phrases, investing the whole speech with subtle flavours of irony, commiseration, realism and humour which cannot be reproduced in English'. This assertion points to yet another broad twin-track dynamic within Scottish literature, that between oral and written literature, the former infusing the latter with what the literary academic Roderick Watson describes as 'the irreverent mobility of a vernacular tradition, carnivalesque, parodic, iconoclastic and double-voiced'.
Robbie BurnsThis is partly where the aforementioned Robert Burns, Scotland’s other chief contender for the title of all-time literary hero, comes into his own. Burns’s work and biography encompass all the frictional creative constituents of Stevenson’s, plus a humble background, an extra dose of revolutionary political philosophy, an exquisite musical sensibility and a formidable appetite for earthly pleasures (in contrast to the tubercular Stevenson’s lifelong delicacy), also crammed into the poet’s 37-year allotted span.
Another distinctive strand traceable through both Scots and Gaelic culture is the ancient competitive tradition known as 'flyting'. This involved a stand-up bout between two poets who would vie in trading insults, satire and ribaldry; the winner being he – or sometimes she – who extemporised the wittiest abuse. Such contests were essentially good-humoured, their object being to celebrate eloquence and verbal agility, rather than to humiliate – but at the same time, no punches were pulled. It’s a vivid analogy for those more favourable periods in the country’s cultural history, when – in a literary context - the polyvalent qualities of Scottish experience and expression have provided a fertile source of imaginative possibility, linguistic versatility, subversive pugnacity and willingness to engage with further differences and contradictions.
Learning, libraries and literacy
Walter Bower's Scotichronicon, Coupar Angus Abbey  (National Library of Scotland)At the same time, it must be remembered that Scottish claims to heavyweight calibre in the field of letters – however hyperbolic a defensive Scot can be on this subject - stand on deep and broadly-planted foundations. In the 15th century, with a population of three million, Scotland had already established three universities: St Andrews, founded in 1411, Glasgow (1451) and Aberdeen (1494), with Edinburgh to follow in 1582. The general thrust of Scottish education has historically been broader-based and less specialised than in England, while access to its universities has been less narrowly restricted in socio-economic terms.
The foundations of a national education system were laid as far back as 1496, when a new law required all 'barons and freeholders of substance' to send their sons to school from age eight or nine; by this time every principal Scottish town had a grammar school capable of teaching at least rudimentary Latin. In his First Book of Discipline (c 1560), the Protestant Reformer John Knox set out a far more detailed framework, from parish primary schools through secondary education to university and beyond, a system which was intended to be compulsory for rich and poor alike. The scheme made little practical impact at the time, but has served as an ideal for Scottish education ever since.
Advocates' LibraryScotland has long been well provided, too, with libraries. The Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, founded in 1689, operated effectively as a national library almost from its inception, assuming that title officially in 1925. Other, more specialist or academic libraries also date from this period or even earlier, such as those belonging to Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons (1505) and Physicians (1681), while most of the major university libraries are as old as their parent institutions. Local public libraries have existed throughout Scotland since at least the late 17th century: when the first UK-wide Public Libraries Bill went before the London Parliament, a Scottish MP successfully argued for Scotland’s exclusion from its terms, owing to the quality and quantity of provision already in place.
Literacy was well-nigh universal in Lowland Scotland by the mid 18th century, and in 1826 the government’s New Statistical Account for Scotland noted that: 'However humble their condition the peasantry in the southern districts can all read and are generally more or less skilful in writing and arithmetic, and under the disguise of their uncouth appearance they possess a laudable zeal for knowledge. . . not generally found among the same class of men in other countries in Europe.' Continuing this egalitarian tradition – referred to by the historian George Davie in the oft-cited title of his 1961 book, The Democratic Intellect - per capita levels of bookbuying, bookshop provision and library borrowing in Scotland today remain higher than the UK average.
Further perspectives
Scott's Napolean (University of Stirling)To approach a full thematic overview of Scottish literature, from the ancient to the contemporary, all this must be further contextualised by the most familiarly-conflicted aspects of Scotland’s history and culture: its ambivalent political identity as a one-time, long since stateless, now newly-devolved nation, traditionally dominated by its larger imperial neighbour; its experiences both as a subject territory and an enthusiastic partner in empire; its multiple linguistic traditions, in Scots, Gaelic and English (not to mention Latin, Norse and French); the presence within its borders of two respectively world-renowned intellectual and industrial cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, together with tracts of legendary romantic wilderness.
The balance of power and effect between these multifarious sparring influences has shifted back and forth throughout Scotland’s cultural history, in response to external circumstances, with both positive and adverse results. At times its literature has seemed thoroughly cowed by and subordinate to Anglo-centric models, interpretations and value-systems – England being, after all, the world’s original literary superpower. In this context, as with other marginalised cultures, Scottish differences were translated as shortcomings, any specifically Scottish style or theme automatically defined as parochial, sentimental and retroactive - attitudes widely internalised and in turn propounded further by Scots themselves. This in turn gave rise to the intriguing (and, once again, double-faced) concept of the 'Scottish cringe', which denotes both the sense of cultural inferiority that generations of Scots have been conditioned to feel, and the embarrassment experienced when confronted with the kind of ignoble caricatures purported to represent them.
When, however – as has happened before, and is happening again today - William McIllvanney’s description of Scotland as 'a mongrel nation' is experienced as a strength, not a weakness; as a positive and powerful defining plank of contemporary identity, rather than any dilution of distinctiveness, Scottish culture can both embrace and take on the world. Nowhere is this more apparent right now than in Scottish literature. Building on the diverse legacies of such world-renowned greats as Burns, Stevenson, MacDiarmid, Walter Scott, James Boswell, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, John Buchan, A J Cronin, Alistair MacLean, Naomi Mitchison and Edwin Muir, a cross-generational swathe of current Scottish writers are winning popular recognition and critical distinction on the international literary stage.
 
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Date updated: 21 May 2007
 
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