Neil M. Gunn
Neil M. Gunn

Author: John Barclay Pick

Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0746311206

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Neil Gunn has long been recognized in Scotland as one of the well-springs of the literary renaissance of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties and is now generally accepted as the most significant novelist the Highlands of Scotland has produced. Yet his work has divided the critics: one view sees him as essentially a regional writer recreating the history of the Highlands and exploring the values of a traditional society. Another sees his greatest contribution in the later novels which deal with the deepest issues of the day in more exploratory and experimental fashion. This study demonstrates that in fact Gunn accepts no limitations in psychological and philosophical penetration, and deals always with the whole universe of man and the other landscape of the mind. The varied criticism of Gunn and the reasons for his neglect outside Scotland are sharply examined, and his status as a novelist of European stature is assessed.

Beyond Scotland
Beyond Scotland

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 900448387X

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Scottish creative writing in the twentieth century was notable for its willingness to explore and absorb the literatures of other times and other nations. From the engagement with Russian literature of Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan, through to the interplay with continental literary theory, Scottish writers have proved active participants in a diverse international literary practice. Scottish criticism has, arguably, often been slow in appreciating the full extent of this exchange. Preoccupied with marking out its territory, with identifying an independent and distinctive tradition, Scottish criticism has occasionally blinded itself to the diversity and range of its writers. In stressing the importance of cultural independence, it has tended to overlook the many virtues of interdependence. The essays in this book aim to offer a corrective view. They celebrate the achievement of Scottish writing in the twentieth century by offering a wider basis for appreciation than a narrow idea of 'Scottishness'. Each essay explores an aspect of Scottish writing in an individual foreign perspective; together they provide an enriching account of a national literary practice that has deep, and often surprisingly complex, roots in international culture.

A Celebration of the Light
A Celebration of the Light

Author: John Burns

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780389207801

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This is a penetrating study of the striking parallels between the work of Scottish novelist Neil Gunn and Eastern thought, particularly those of Zen Buddhism and Taoism. All of his books are crucially concerned with man's archetypal quest for wisdom and freedom. Many of his characters have just those qualities of stillness, inner luminosity and unspoken meaning that characterize the traditional Oriental religions. In a detailed and lively analysis of seven of Gunn's major novels including Highland River, The Silver Darlings, and The Well at the World's End, Burns explores the significance of such moments in Gunn's fiction. Contents: Light, Delight and Zen, Introduction; The Pivot of Tao, Butcher's Broom 1934; Returning to the Source, Highland River 1937; The Heart of the Circle, The Silver Darlings 1941; Slaying the Mind, The Serpent 1943; The World of Light, The Well at the World's End 1951; Beyond Violence, Bloodhunt 1952; Seeking the Master, The Other Landscape 1954; Celebration of the Light; References; Glossary of Zen Terms; Bibliography; Index

The Lost Chart
The Lost Chart

Author: Neil M. Gunn

Publisher: Soft Editions

Published: 2004-05

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1843500787

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At the height of the cold war, shipping executive Dermot Cameron is entrusted by British Intelligence with a chart of the approaches to a remote but strategically important Hebridean island. Rescuing a young woman from two attackers in the street, he becomes involved in a brawl and loses the chart. His subsequent hunt for the lost chart leads him into adventures on land and sea, and involves him in brushes with a murderous communist fifth-column. As a diplomatic crisis looms, bringing with it the threat of a potential nuclear showdown between the super-powers and a return to the dark ages, Dermot's search prompts his own personal reappraisal of the people and things he values.

Encyclopedia of British Writers
Encyclopedia of British Writers

Author: Christine L. Krueger

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2014-07

Total Pages: 881

ISBN-13: 1438108702

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This concise encyclopedic reference profiles more than 800 British poets

Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959
Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959

Author: Margery Palmer McCulloch

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0748634754

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This innovative book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.

Notional Identities
Notional Identities

Author: Thomas Christie

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-07-18

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1443864455

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Notional Identities takes up the challenge of engaging with the popular genres of speculative fiction and crime fiction by Scottish authors from the mid-1970s until the beginning of the twenty-first century, examining a variety of significant novels from across the decades in the light of wider considerations of ideology, genre and national identity. The book investigates the extent to which the national political and cultural climate of this tumultuous era informed the narrative form and social commentary of such works, and considers the manner in which—and the extent to which—a specific and identifiably Scottish response to these ideological matters can be identified in popular prose fiction during the period under discussion. Although Scottish literary fiction of recent decades has been studied in considerable depth, Scottish popular genre literature has received markedly less critical scrutiny in comparison. Notional Identities aims to help in redressing this balance, examining popular Scottish texts of the stated period in order to reflect upon whether a significant relationship can be discerned between genre fiction and the mainstream of Scottish literary writing, and to consider the characteristics of the literary connections which exist between these different modes of writing.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History

Author: T. M. Devine

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2012-01-26

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 0199563691

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A landmark study which reconsiders in fresh and illuminating ways the classic themes of the nation's history since the sixteenth century, as well as a number of new topics which are only now receiving detailed attention. Places the Scottish experience firmly in an international historical experience.

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature
The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature

Author: Dinah Birch

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-05-30

Total Pages: 973

ISBN-13: 0191036749

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Based on the bestselling Oxford Companion to English Literature, this is an indispensable, compact guide to all aspects of English literature. Over 5,500 new and revised A to Z entries give unrivalled coverage of writers, works, historical context, literary theory, allusions, characters, and plot summaries. Discursive feature entries supply a wealth of information about important genres in literature. For this fourth edition, the dictionary has been fully revised and updated to include expanded coverage of postcolonial, African, black British, and children's literature, as well as improved representation in the areas of science fiction, biography, travel literature, women's writing, gay and lesbian writing, and American literature. The appendices listing literary prize winners, including the Nobel, Man Booker, and Pulitzer prizes, have all been updated and there is also a timeline, chronicling the development of English literature from c. 1000 to the present day. Many entries feature recommended web links, which are listed and regularly updated on a dedicated companion website. Written originally by a team of more than 140 distinguished authors and extensively updated for this new edition, this book provides an essential point of reference for English students, teachers, and all other readers of literature in English.

Morning Tide
Morning Tide

Author: Neil M. Gunn

Publisher: Souvenir Press

Published: 2011-03-01

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0285640046

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Twelve-year-old Hugh MacBeth lives in a small fishing village near Caithness at the end of the nineteenth century. He is becoming aware of his mother's worries that he and his brother will follow their father to sea, and is becoming to realise that the fishing industry is doomed to decline, a decline that will result in the death of his village. A lyrical and poignant novel, Morning Tide, describes how a young boy learns to become a man. It is a poetic testimony to the intensity of feeling in physical experience, the touch of the earth and the coldness of the sea, and in the need to be free. Sensitivity and wildness are pitted against the restrictions of family and social life, and it is more than a complete picture of childhood; unfolding into a set of values that speaks powerfully to the present.