Lewis Grassic Gibbon Research Articles

Adapting Sunset Song: Authorial, Industrial, and National Discourses in the 2015 Film Adaptation of Sunset Song

This article traces the discourses shaping the 2015 film adaptation of Sunset Song, directed by Terence Davies. In doing so, it shows how both the film and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's original novel are involved in complex negotiations of ideas about Scottishness. In the case of the film, this is evident in its sophisticated and poetic visual engagement with some aspects of the novel's characterization of Chris Guthrie, its use of language, and its representation of landscapes. The same negotiations are apparent in paratextual materials that demonstrate the route taken by the producers and director when navigating the fraught economic terrain of feature-length filmmaking in Scotland, both in terms of funding applications to national funder Creative Scotland, and the way it mobilized particular discourses of arthouse and auteur cinema in its marketing and production materials. Finally, through a close look at the emphasis on militarism, femininity, and landscape in the film text, the article considers how the film performs a kind of Scotland that is amenable to the tastes of the filmmaker, the desires of the public funder, and the arthouse film festival circuit where it was primarily consumed.

Irish, ‘Celtic’, and the Future

Irish, ‘Celtic’, and the Future Alan Titley (bio) When I was asked to imagine Ireland, and the place that the Irish language, literature, and culture might have in it in 2030, I had to swallow hard. It is difficult enough to examine a past that is always changing, almost impossible to assess a present that is in constant flux: so what chance is there to imagine a future that will never be what we think? I have a long list of books and articles foretelling the future, and they are all wrong. I considered crystal balls and tealeaves and gastromancy or consulting tarot cards, or Nostradamus, or even Colm Cille, but I lack the interpretative gadgets to unlock any of them. The initial proposal asked me to wrestle with the need for a new ‘Celtic Revival’, which casts us back more than a hundred years, but I tried to derail this idea and push it into a siding. Hence my need to stick jabs into Celticism before looking at the place of the Irish language and its literature in the new Ireland that is always beckoning beyond the immediate horizon. I The rusty link of today with a ‘Celtic revival’ rubs badly. As scholars are hardly agreed as to what the word ‘Celtic’ means, we are in a bit of a bind. The beginnings of what we generally call ‘the Celtic revival’ is now one hundred and fifty years old. We could put a stake in the ground somewhere to inform us when it began and another stake in its heart telling us finally when it croaked, but a good beginning might be Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867. It at least marks the beginning of when that unfortunate phrase began to be used with any scope. Matthew Arnold didn’t know that much, really, about Celtic literature, and particularly not about Irish literature. His main source seems to have been O’Curry’s Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History – not exactly trustworthy when it comes to the range of the subject. His other sources were books of grammar not generally known for manifestations of the creative imagination. Arnold [End Page 29] also made the mistake of attributing certain character traits to Celtic literature: love, beauty, charm, spirituality, lightness, and brightness. It is a common mistake to attach fixed values, forms or natures to a literature or people. Even the great Kuno Meyer, who knew a lot about Irish literature, made the well-known observation that ‘the Celts were always quick to take an artistic hint; they avoid the obvious and the commonplace; the half-said thing to them is dearest.’1 He cannot have been unaware of Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin, from whom words poured in spouts and cascades like the Torc waterfall, or indeed the great Táin Bó Cuailnge, where the warp spasms of Cuchulainn surpass anything in the Books of the Apocalypse for horror and grotesquerie. The point, as well shall see, is that Irish literature is not any one thing. It is a coat of many colours in ‘the drunkenness of being various’. It is a blooming buzzing confusion of genres and directions and new beginnings and dead ends and going off on a skite and returning seeking somewhere to land. Just two things before I take off. The first is that this is not a historical review or examination, although precedent will always raise its relevant head. The second is that, for the purposes of this paper, what I understand by Irish literature is literature written in the Irish language. Of course, I would not normally exclude Irish writers in English from that description, but I am using it here in the same sense in which Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka or Alice Munro or Lewis Grassic Gibbon are classed under English literature – because they write in English. I’m using it as a linguistic label. I also refuse to use the word ‘Gaelic’ when attached to writers in Irish for two simple reasons. The first is that the language has historically, as far back as the earliest English dictionaries and even in English government...

루이스 그래식 기본의 『스코틀랜드 서』

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.

Aberdeen, City of Culture?

Aberdeen, City of Culture?

ЭМБЛЕМА ШОТЛАНДИИ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ АЛАСДЕРА ГРЕЯ

Alasdair Gray is one of the most influential post-war Scottish writer along with Muriel Spark, Robin Jenkins, and James Kelman. He is wellknown not only as a contemporary novelist, intellectual, and esthete but also as a political activist and a Scottish independence supporter. Although his novels are written exclusively in English, they are characterized with a strong national flavor and are inspired by the ideas of the eminent Scottish scientists, philosophers, and community leaders. The article dwells on the analysis of Scottish national emblem in Alasdair Gray’s fiction. This emblem manifests itself through female nation figures, which were first used in Scottish nationalist discourse by Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon during the period of Scottish Literary Renaissance. One of the most recurrent themes in Alasdair Gray’s fiction are female suffering and entrapment, which serve as political allegories of the national inferiority complex («Scottish cringe») and subordinate position within the United Kingdom. Thus, the writer strives to include Scotland into the post-colonial framework. In order to re-imagine Scottish nation figure Alasdair Gray addresses both the literary tradition and the latest feminist ideas of his time. Unlike other contemporary Scottish writers who tend to present this figure as a passive victim of political injustice, Alasdair Gray intentionally makes her initiative and active non-victim. She is also constructed as a female monster, which alludes to discrepancy between country’s rich history and its «young» parliament.

Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923–31 by Max Saunders

Reviewed by: Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923–31 by Max Saunders John McGowan Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923–31. Max Saunders. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv +423. $80.00 (cloth). Students of modernism have long been familiar with the despairing conclusion that the world’s evil cannot be overcome. It dates to the “lost generation” after World War I, which precipitated the conviction that modernity is an unmitigated disaster. The styles of pessimism may have changed, but the substance has not. Barely a glimmer of hope to be seen anywhere—and god help the intellectual who betrays the slightest belief in progress, in a better future. He will henceforth (and summarily) be condemned to middlebrow hell from which there is no return. Max Saunders is well acquainted with wistful melancholy. He is the author of a majestic two-volume biography of Ford Madox Ford. Is there anywhere in literature a more extended portrait of the hapless “good” man than Parade’s End’s (1924–28) Tietjens, whose decency and moral integrity is thwarted at every turn, given no possible scope of effective action in a damnable [End Page 865] modern world? Now, in his entertaining and fascinating new book, Imagined Futures, Saunders offers a bracing counterhistory of despair, overturning both our received notion of the disillusionment following World War I and challenging our by-now habitual pessimism. The vehicle for Saunders’s assault on facile generalizations about the post-World War I cultural mood and on the fashionable weltschmerz of our own day is a series of 110 short books published between 1923 and 1931. The “To-Day and To-Morrow” series was edited by C. K. Ogden (the translator of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, coauthor with I. A. Richards of The Meaning of Meaning [1923], indefatigable editor, and the high priest of BASIC English). Most volumes in the series were titled in a similar fashion: a figure from classical Greece, followed by “the future of . . .” A few examples: Halycon, or The Future of Monogamy (Vera Brittain); Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language (Robert Graves); Paris, or the Future of War (B. H. Liddell Hart). The notables who contributed volumes included Dora and Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winifred Holtby, C. E. M. Joad, Bonamy Dobrée, André Maurois, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Jeans, and future Indian president Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The series got rolling with Marxist scientist J. B. S. Haldane’s 1923 Daedalus, or Science and the Future, with Haldane’s upbeat prognosis countered by Bertrand Russell’s pessimistic 1924 riposte, Icarus, or the Future of Science. From there, as Saunders shows (his book partakes of the burgeoning field of the history of the book), the series developed the momentum that carried it through its eight-year life, with subsequent volumes often entering into direct dialogue with previous ones, and most volumes fairly widely reviewed and circulated. I defy any reader of Saunders’s book to come away indifferent to the treasure trove he has uncovered. Just his quotations from the thirty or so volumes he discusses in some detail whet this reader’s appetite. The writing is lively, and the imaginations on display energizing. One sample, from Douglas Woodruff’s Plato’s American Republic, in which Socrates visits twentieth-century America, will have to suffice. Modern Science appears as “a divine priestess” who “is invoked in all difficulties, whose words are received with great reverence, and that though her oracles are more than usually incomprehensible and fickle and her words long and horrible; . . . she is dear to the Americans because she speaks principally about machines, and tells them there shall be more and more of them, and an increasing number of parts in each” (quoted in Saunders, 187). If Saunders’s book has a flaw, it is how to deal with such wealth. Like most scholarship that offers a first visit to an archive, Saunders opens up numerous possible paths of investigation that he cannot fully explore. He devotes chapters to the natural sciences, the human sciences, technology...

Nature Trauma: Ecology and the Returning Soldier in First World War English and Scottish Fiction, 1918-1932.

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), Nan Shepherd's The Weatherhouse (1930) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1932), trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and 'reconnecting' with known and natural places.

Minor Modernisms: The Scottish Renaissance and the Translation of German-language Modernism

Germany has been epitomised in the twentieth century as Britain's main rival and adversary. Yet Scottish modernists were influenced by Germany and German-language modernism to think more internationally about their nation and work, a cultural encounter that took place largely in and through translation. Willa and Edwin Muir, who in the early 1920s stayed at educational modernist A. S. Neill's experimental school in Germany, translated German-language modernists such as Kafka and Broch. Hugh MacDiarmid utilised translations of Nietzsche to inform his call for a renascent Scotland. Lewis Grassic Gibbon would write Sunset Song after reading Gustav Frenssen's regional novel Jörn Uhl. Behind this lies the contention that the breakup of world empires, such as the British and Austro-Hungarian, occasioned minor modernisms (to adapt Deleuze and Guattari) such as that in Scotland, and that translation was central to the emergence, impact, and transnationality of the Scottish renaissance movement.

Glasgow, Anti-Urbanism and the Scottish Literary Renaissance

This paper examines the origins, characteristics, defining role and continuing legacy of the anti-urban discourses of the Scottish Literary Renaissance. As part of the endeavour to revitalise Scottish culture, some writings by Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and George Blake represent Glasgow in particular as a victim and agent of industrialisation and modernity, and characterise the city as a threat to a supposedly more authentic conceptualisation of ‘Scottishness’. Anti-urbanism continues to condition the trajectory of modern Scottish urban writing. Later writers – such as Edward Gaitens, Archie Hind, Alasdair Gray and Alan Spence – often ‘write back to the Renaissance’ by confirming the multifaceted reputation of Glasgow as a source of both despair and creative inspiration, as something to write about and against.

The Romantic and the Real: James Leslie Mitchell and the Search for a Middle Way

James Leslie Mitchell is remembered primarily for his trilogy A Scots Quair (1932–34), published under his better-known pseudonym, Lewis Grassic Gibbon. The Quair has long been recognized as a central work in the Scottish literary tradition and has commonly been approached in relation to realism and national identity. By reading the novel in relation to Mitchell’s earlier fiction, it is possible to see his writing as exploring the tension between realism and romance. Mitchell’s work has affinities with that of his contemporaries, especially John Cowper Powys. Both novelists replace a linear idea of human progress with ever-oscillating oppositions in order to investigate the relation between fiction and experience. This reappraisal allows Mitchell’s work to be read not only in terms of Scottish or regional fiction, but also as an important contribution to modernist debates on the value of fiction and romance in modernity.

Scottish Fiction and the British Empire by Douglas S. Mack

MLR, I03.1, 2oo8 I99 Gallagher argues, was alarmed by thenotion of thedecline of aesthetic value through repetition (for example, by silly lady novelists), causing literaryvalue to decrease as it is 'consumed' by the reader. This enables Gallagher to read themajor characters ofDaniel Deronda convincingly in accordance with the parameters of artisticmoti vation. She then rather curiously reverses chronology by stepping back to consider an earlier text, Scenes ofClerical Life, which she reads as an inherently Malthusian text treating sexuality and culture, and the growth of consciousness. The concluding pages, encompassing a hasty trajectory fromGeorge Eliot via Hardy toT. S. Eliot, are rushed and gestural, but overall The Body Economic will doubtless become re quired reading foranyone seeking to understand the complex lines of affiliation and resistance between economic theoryand the literarytext in themid-Victorian period. I note the following errors: Priestly (p. 68); Harriett Martineau (p. 78); Humphrey House (p. I07); Battaille (p. iI6). LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY ROGER EBBATSON ScottishFictionand theBritishEmpire. By DOUGLASS. MACK. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2006. ix+247Pp. ?I6.99. ISBN 978-0-7486-I8l4-9. This book has useful things to say on how the fictionof 'non-elite people' (p. I2) in Scotland has been presented and consumed. Not surprisingly,Douglas S. Mack, a highly distinguished textual scholar of JamesHogg, provides an illuminating account of the 'EttrickShepherd's' subaltern status and isparticularly interesting on his re lationship with JohnWilson, where Hogg writes in such a way as slyly to subvert Wilson's inauthentic rendition of common country life.To some extent, then,Mack brings awelcome postcolonial focus to Scottish literature, something thathas been very slow todevelop. However, all isnot asmodern here as itseems. Overall the treat ment is constantly in danger of lapsing into something much more old-fashioned: pursuing the inauthentic inorder toestablish the credentials of the culturally authen tic (such as Hogg). Good treatment ofHogg and his self-conscious relationship to Robert Burns is followed by a hotchpotch ofmaterial not always incisively chosen, or critiqued with sufficientcomplexity. For Mack, 'Walter Scott [and] JohnBuchan ... .]did much to sustain the Imperial master-narrative [while] Burns, Hogg [and] Lewis Grassic Gibbon [. . .] question some of the attitudes and assumptions that sustained themaster-narrative of the British Empire' (p. I2). One simply has to quibble here since the high point of the British Empire (inVictorian times) post-dates thewriting ofBurns, Scott, and Hogg. Some of thematerial in thisbook has appeared previously elsewhere, and too often itreads like a farfromentirely tightchain ofmoments in theauthor's selective reading of Scottish literature,where poetic figuressuch as SorleyMacLean and Tom Leonard are shoe-horned into thenarrative to less than good effect (in the case of the latterwe are told limply that he 'is a socialist who writes in the language of his own people' (P. 229)). Ironically,MacLean ispotentially open to fruitfulpostcolonial reading, but Mack's book isabout fiction.Robert Louis Stevenson appears, but largely ina section on Kidnapped thathas interesting things to say,certainly, about the latenineteenth century context (particularly theCrofters' War) to thisnovel set in theeighteenth cen tury. It isastonishing thatnothing is said about Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide, arguably his most piercing account of theBritish colonial mentality. A book about 'Scottish fictionand theBritish Empire' might also turn serious attention to JohnGray's Park (which in strange fantasymode takes its cue from the experiences of the great Scot tish explorer ofAfrica, Mungo Park), butMack seems unaware of thisnovel. An all too traditional narrative of theScottish Enlightenment is found in Mack's mentality, 200 Reviews where Walter Scott isprimed by thismilieu toconform to the commercially prosper ous, new British superstate and itburgeoning imperial ambition. What, then, about JamesBruce ofKinnaird? His accounts ofEthiopia in thesecond half of theeighteenth century were received as fictionwhen he returned toBritain, and Bruce, aman re presenting the strong anthropological urge of theScottish Enlightenment, responded loudly about the complacency of theBritish Christian mindset in its incredulity over thatwhich did not fititspreconceptions. Bruce issurely a key starting-point in the en gagement between theScottish mind and Britain's attitude to 'inferior'peoples. Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Spartacus, strongly informed by thiswriter's colonial experiences serving overseas in theBritish forces in the I920S, does notmerit amention; instead there is extended discussion...

‘Nothing is true but change’: archaeology, time and landscape in the writing of Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Summary This paper examines the treatment of landscape, temporality and archaeology in the writings of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, focusing on the three books of A Scots Quair. Through a discussion of Grassic Gibbon's work it is suggested that an understanding of different, interrelated, timescales is central to understanding landscapes. An understanding of time, scale and narrative in writing about landscape can potentially reveal a richer way of viewing the world.

A Scots Quair and the Times of Labour

This article will explore the imaginative, philosophical and political relations between human labour and selfhood in a central fictional text of the 1930s: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair. James Leslie Mitchell, writing under the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published the three volumes that make up this trilogy between 1932 and 1934. The first, Sunset Song (1932) develops narrative and symbolic resources for the representation of the economic and cultural history of farming communities in North-East Scotland from 1911 to the end of the First World War (with a formally inventive prelude that reaches back to the Norman Conquest). This novel is centrally concerned with the developing consciousness of Chris Guthrie, a farmer’s daughter, and much of its free-indirect narrative style offers glimpses into her perceptions, fears, and desires as she moves from childhood to early adulthood. The second novel, Cloud Howe (1933), shows the pressure on community and on continuity as Chris moves with her second husband and her son to a small industrial town in the 1920s. It explores the efforts towards collectivity as well as the social and psychic costs of faith, as Chris and her family try to sustain relationships and histories in the conflictual and rapidly changing social relationships of Scotland in the 1920s. The final novel, Grey Granite (1933) follows the logic of the first two novels in moving to the city. Chris’s son Ewan acts out the logic of intense identification with the impersonal demands of the collective, a psychological and social adjustment that is signalled through the symbolic centrality of rocks and minerals to the novel, while Chris struggles to survive her financially precarious identity as an impoverished widow.

Review: Scottish Novels and Scottish Language

The fall of 'scientific materialism' in 1989-91 continues to reverberate, and has reached literary criticism. Hegelian-Marxist etatisme saw economic integration and the formation of the modern state sanctifying national canons. In the 1960s the prevailing view of the post-Scott novel was the neo-Marxist one of David Craig in Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1961, explaining its nineteenth-century marginality as the consequence of a commercial popularity which diluted the complexities of Scottish life. In this, the Scott-Gait novel was seen as attempting to reconstitute history, but its subsequent direction was either (via Carlyle) towards the British mainstream, or towards Kailyard sentimentalism and obscurity. Contrasted with this, Cairns Craig in his energetic interpretation questions the very notion of historical centrality. Surveying novels from George Douglas Brown and John Buchan, via Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn to Allan Massie, Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, Craig sees a void where the congealed politics of history ought to be. Adopting Alasdair Maclntyre's identification of morality with community, and applying to this Colin Kidd's theme of a 'genuine' national history suppressed by British Whiggism in the later 18th century, he identifies a tendency in the modern Scots novel to plunge through a 'thin1 history to mythology via anthropology or psychology:

Review: The Sea-Bird And The Crane

Canada, the American South, the Caribbean, Scotland: there's no shortage of material there for a volume such as this. Of its nature we would expect the book to be variously faceted and focused. One instinctively welcomes the phenomenon that Jamaica Kincaid, Eudora Welty, Malcolm Lowry, Marion Angus and Lewis Grassic Gibbon arc all discussed within one set of covers. It may be that, between such writers of apparently disparate cultures, potentially provocative comparisons are not maximised; despite the plenary session which is transcribed at the end of the book one often has the feeling that individual scholars are doing their own individual bit, scattering the small change of predictable academic pieties. That is probably inevitable in a publication of this kind. However, if it doesn't sufficiently explore Terranglia, this collection usefully maps it: an honourable task for any book.

The modern Scottish novel: narrative and the national imagination

In the last quarter century, Scottish novelists from Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and Allan Massie to James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy and Irvine Welsh have achieved significant international success. In The Modern Scottish Novel Cairns Craig shows how the work of such writers is constructed by a powerful national tradition in the novel, formed in the first decades of the century by writers such as John Buchan, Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn, a tradition whose distinctive thematic and formal concerns have shaped a unique contribution to the novel in English. Tracing the influence of Scotland's political and social history on its novelists from the 1890s to the 1990s, Craig argues that the Scottish novel has had to develop a highly specific set of formal techniques to cope with a situation in which the dominance of the English language is challenged by the survival of the rich inheritance of Scots speech, and in which the continuing effects of Calvinism imply that all fiction is necessarily deceitful, when not actually diabolic. Craig also sets the Scottish novel in the specific traditions of Scottish intellectual life - from J.G. Frazer to John Macmurray and R.D. Laing. The Modern Scottish Novel provides the intellectual and artistic context for some of the most exciting and challenging contemporary writing in English.

Land, Democracy And Culture In Scotland

That is the Land out there, under the sleet, churned and pelted there in the dark, the long rigs upturning their clayey faces to the spear-onset of the sleet. That is the Land, a dim vision this night of laggard fences and long stretching rigs. And the voice of it the true and unforgettable voice you can hear even such a night as this as the dark comes down, the immemorial plaint of the peewit, flying lost. That is the Land though not quite all. Those folk in the byre whose lattern light is a glimmer through the sleet as they muck and bed and tend the kye, and milk the milk into tin pails, in curling froth they are The Land in as great a measure. (Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 'The Land', reprinted in The Speak of the Mearns , 1994, p. 152)

British fiction in the 1930s: the dispiriting decade

Acknowledgments - The Ambiguities of Commitment - PART 1: THE LANGUAGE OF SOCIAL REFERENCE - Richard Aldington's Excoriation of the Past - J.B. Priestley's Indigenous Social Voices - Moments of Intense Social Visualisation: Winifred Holtby, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Patrick Hamilton - PART 2: SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL METAPHOR - Rosamond Lehmann's Social and Historical Landscapes - Houses and Cultural Betrayal in Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction - Henry Green's Particular Visionary Gerunds - Nicholas Blake's 'Stake in the Social System' - L.P. Hartley and the Reverberations of Absence - Essays, Chronicles and Fiction: Alternatives to Despair - Index

Faulkner’s Women: The Myth and the Muse by David Williams

The items that are indexed under the names of novelists give a rough indication of the attention given to the various novelists by “general critic­ ism,” distorted somewhat, perhaps, by such things as the increased attention that scholarly journals have given contemporary writers in recent years and the popular appeal of “the Angry Young Men” that, as the topical index illustrates, stimulated journalists. In that index “ the Angry Young Men” outdo “Bloomsbury,” for example, by 46 items to 14. James Joyce leads in the number of items in the novelists’ index, followed by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Graham Greene, John Galsworthy, E. M. Forster, Arnold Bennett, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, and George Orwell, in that order. Iris Murdoch, Dorothy Richardson (who fares better, one suspects, in this list than she would in a list that tabulated individual studies), Somerset Maugham, and Ford Madox Ford are well down the list, in that order. Jack Lindsay and Lewis Grassic Gibbon are near the bottom. Most of their entries are derived from journals published in eastern Europe, where they are apparently esteemed as leading British writers. Prejudice, no doubt, afflicts critics of both the east and the west. These two novelists may deserve more attention at home and less exaltation in eastern Europe. These are some of the observations that one may make while reading Cassis’s bibliography, but there are more substantial things to be gained from the book. It is a compendium that will suggest topics to researchers and that may save them some labour as they pursue their research. It is to be hoped that Cassis will add supplements to it. j . k . j o h n s t o n e / University of Saskatchewan David Williams, Faulkner’s Women: The Myth and the Muse (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977). xviii, 288. $16.00 Faulkner scholars attracted to the title of this thematic study by David Williams should be forewarned by him that, “Woman as such is evidently not the subject of this essay; woman as the living monument of the presence of deity, or as an expression of some great and inspiring power in the creative act, is nearer to what is meant by ‘the myth and the muse’ ” (p. xiv). Wil­ liams’s approach to his subject is Jungian and he makes frequent use of Jungian terminology. Although not a prerequisite, knowledge of and sym­ pathy with Carl Jung is an advantage in reading this criticism. An attempt to re-examine “Faulkner’s artistic view of human destiny” (p. 242), Williams’s book is a curiously selective one. Since he finds Faulkner’s work not equally motivated by the myth of woman, he concentrates on four 260 novels that he thinks so motivated-— The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August. Following a theoretical introduction that is rather excessive in length and cumbersome in style, is a cursory look at the myth of woman in Faulkner’s early works — Soldier’s Pay, Mosquitoes, and Sartoris. The last chapters of the book are devoted to the “progress of demythication” (p. xvi) in The Hamlet, The Unvanquished, The Town, The Mansion, and The Reivers. Since they do “ not figure in the mythology of woman” (p. xvi), major works such as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses are completely excluded. Of the four books given as Williams calls it “ full-dress analysis of the myth” (p. xvi), The Sound and The Fury is the most naked. Although the discussion of myths in the novel is often fascinating, it can also be of peripheral interest and of disproportionate length. It may be true, as Williams says, that the symbol of the tree in Caddy’s characterization has not been fully explored, but the pains he takes to redress the balance are surely unnecessary. The sundance mythology of the North American Indian, the tree burial of the Wagogo of Tanganyika, and Yggdrasill, the all-dominating world tree of Norse myth, seem far-fetched. On the other hand, a myth as central and as salient as that of Demeter and Persephone is completely ignored...

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and the Pesantry

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and the Pesantry