Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Abstract

Lewis Grassic Gibbon galvanized the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, the first novel of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair, that drew vividly upon his deprived upbringing on a small croft in Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century. Yet his literary legacy extends significantly beyond his breakout book. The seventeen volumes that he amassed in his short life, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, demonstrate his versatility, as historian, essayist, biographer and fiction writer. His corpus pays testimony to his core principles, rooted in his rural upbringing: his restless humanitarianism and his deep veneration for the natural world. Set against an informed conspectus of Mitchell’s life and times and incorporating substantive new source material, this study provides a comprehensive and searching analysis of the canon of a combative writer whose fame in recent years – as cultural nationalist, left-wing libertarian, proto-feminist, neo-romantic visionary and trailblazing modernist – has carried far beyond his native land. In tune with the intellectual climate of the inter-war years, Gibbon emerges as a passionate advocate of revolutionary political activism; in addition, as a profound believer in the overarching primacy of nature, he is represented as a supreme practitioner in the field of ecofiction. Coupled with his modernist experimentation with language and narrative, this firmly establishes him amongst the foremost fiction writers of the twentieth century – uniquely, a figure whose achievement has consistently won both critical and popular acclaim.