George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

Abstract

For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and creative vision. Many of these writers trod in the footsteps of Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh and J. R R. Tolkien by converting to Catholicism. This book offers an absorbing history of the uncharted territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. By focussing on one of the best-known of Scotland’s literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the uniquely Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown’s writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination provides sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown’s corpus, and also discusses the importance of Brown’s unpublished early works, manuscripts and letters. It includes detailed comparisons between Brown’s writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and Flannery O’Connor. Ultimately, this book contextualises Brown’s place within Scottish Catholic writing, while revealing that Brown’s imagination extended far beyond the ‘small green world’ of Orkney, and embraced a universal human experience.