루이스 그래식 기본의 『스코틀랜드 서』

Abstract

This essay aims at two academic goals by analyzing Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. First, a study of Scottish literature, especially the Scottish Renaissance during the early twentieth century, will help to rethink England-oriented studies of British literature in South Korea and to widen the horizon of studying twentieth-century English literature and modernism. It is only recently that scholars began to appreciate how the primary writers associated with the Scottish Renaissance resisted regressive nationalism or idyllic regionalism. Although the Scottish Renaissance rarely received critical attention in South Korea, it had arisen to reestablish Scottish identity within the ever more complex relationship with the British Empire after the First World War and thus offers an invaluable position to investigate the inner contradictions of British literature. Second, this essay’s study of Gibbon’s masterpiece will focus on its ecological imagination and the ways in which it helps to design more inclusive and just social relations. The protagonist Chris’s ecological attitude and imagination allow her a critical stance toward a series of humanistic beliefs that seek to remodel humanity on their ideals; however, the novel never compromises its realistic recognition of grueling social conditions at the time in Scotland which made it difficult for her vision to be actualized. This powerful ecological imagination combined with the uncompromising historical consciousness creates a narrative tension in this magnum opus and helps to maximize its artistic greatness.