‘We are Scottish nationalist and Catholic’: Death’s Bright Shadow and Catholic literary nationalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contends that although the ‘golden age’ of the English Catholic novel has received (and continues to attract) ample critical attention, there is much still to be gleaned about contemporaneous Scottish Catholic literary works. In presenting George Scott-Moncrieff’s Death’s Bright Shadow (1948) as a case study, the article identifies a distinctively Scottish Catholic and nationalist imagination, which nonetheless owes much to the conventions of the French Catholic Literary Revival, as well as celebrated works by Greene and Waugh. Ultimately, the article suggests that political nationalism is a key feature of work produced by Scottish converts of the early to mid-twentieth century. It proposes that the geographical, cultural and political realities of place which inform the twentieth-century Catholic novel are a notable, if relatively under-explored, part of Scottish Catholic fiction.