English Romanticism, modernism, and the Scottish Renaissance

This dissertation examines the complex relationships between the Scottish Renaissance movement of the 1920s and 30s and the competing pulls of Romantic and Modernist literary aesthetics upon three of its preeminent figures: the poet, critic, and translator Edwin Muir; the novelist and essayist Neil M. Gunn; and the radical novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon. These writers had ties (through little magazines, translation work, and personal and professional relationships) to nearly every arena of modernist culture. Despite these affiliations, however, they found a closer affinity with the visionary and redemptive aesthetics of Romanticism, which by their time had been devalued, if not altogether discredited, by leading Modernist figures such as Eliot, Hulme, Lewis, and Pound.; One of the rarely acknowledged subtexts of the Scottish Renaissance was a desire to realize the possibilities of an "authentic" Romanticism in Scotland, and, in so doing, to create a modern alternative to Modernism. I argue that the ideological and aesthetic commitments of Romanticism were uniquely suited to adaptation by authors who sought a theory of individual and national identity that would encompass notions of traditional community, social and political progress, and a belief that individual experience and communal culture are conjoined and interpenetrative as they are expressed through the aesthetic sphere.; My argument draws broadly upon the range of revisionist critical perspectives that comprise the "New Modernist Studies," especially those with a cultural materialist element, to interrogate our current, sometimes contradictory understandings of the Scottish Renaissance as both a "Modernist" and a nationalist movement, both aesthetically/formally conservative and politically progressive. Reading Muir, Gunn, and Gibbon's late-Romantic responses to the crises that prompted Modernism offers us a deeper understanding of the literary climate of interwar Britain by forcing us to acknowledge a perspective that differed radically from "high" Modernism even as it anticipated what Jed Esty calls the "anthropological turn" of late Modernism---a renewed interest in the local and national as the possible means for recreating a sense of lost cultural and social unity.