The Home-ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland

Abstract

In his broad survey, Modern Scottish Literature, Alan Bold warns against quick dismissals of the popular late nineteenth-century School of fiction: should be wary of categorizing the kailyarders as sentimental fools; they were men who had shrewd judgment for and the responded by adoring the intellectually undemanding the kailyarders produced. Bold's evaluation of the Kailyard (literally, cabbage patch) and its unavoidable presence in Scottish literary and cultural history illustrate the tension between public taste and high art, entertainment and serious intellect, that still gathers around these national tales. The Kailyard's national and international appeal has been explained primarily, by critics such as Bold, tautology that depends on self-evident and static public taste that has very little to do with history or culture. We are told, in other words, that the Kailyard was popular because it reflected popular, and we are to assume vulgar, tastes. The cantankerous modernist Scots poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, certainly had this in mind when in his 1923 poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, he mourned this preposterous presbyterian breed of popular fiction which had tossed real Scottish artists owre the kailyard-wa.''2 Bold echoes this argument at another moment in describing the less lofty Scottish verse of the 1920s as a homemade product cultivated in the kailyard and handled by amateurs.3 George Blake's 1951 study of the Kailyard school condemned the prose as mass of sludge, told by small fry caste of bard who strolled through the heather with claymore at his belt, or he lingered round the bonnie brier bush, telling sweet, amusing little stories of bucolic intrigue the windows of the Presbyterian