Scotland and Scottish Literature

Until recently, Victorian Scottish literature has been ignored or marginalized both within Scottish studies and Victorian studies. Scholars in the latter field have tended to regard Scotland as an afterthought or appendage to England, while those in the former viewed the Victorian era as a fallow period in Scotland’s literary history. Falling between the Romantic era, when Edinburgh rivalled London as a vibrant center of literature and culture, and the Scottish literary renaissance of the early twentieth century, which sought to foster a new cultural nationalism, the Victorian period seemed to be marked by a dearth of literary creativity. This supposed dearth has been attributed to the seamlessness of 19th-century Scotland’s cultural and political incorporation in Great Britain. Many Scottish authors resided in London, the metropolitan center of Britain’s literary empire; and consequently, some of the most prolific and best-known of these authors, such as Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, sometimes are not even recognized as Scottish. Much of the fiction and poetry that is unequivocally Scottish in linguistic register, form, or content was relegated by 20th-century critics to the Kailyard, a term that literally describes a kitchen garden, but that became a pejorative label suggesting the home-grown simplicity of much mid-Victorian Scottish literature. Scholars dismissed Kailyard literature, epitomized by the works of James M. Barrie, Samuel R. Crockett, and Annie S. Swan, as sentimental, parochial, and inauthentic. Since the early twentieth-first century, scholars have begun to question the biases of the literary historical narratives constructed by 20th-century critics. Work on the impact of imperial expansion and emigration and on the formation of the Free Church of Scotland has transformed our understanding of Kailyard literature as a response to economic and social change. Research on the history of print has redirected our attention from London’s literary marketplace to local literary cultures in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee, in addition to other, less urban sites. These developments have begun to redress the exclusion of women and working-class writers from the study of Victorian Scottish literature. Writers working in Gaelic continue to be marginalized, although explorations of fin de siècle Celticism have revealed their impact on those writing in Scots and in English. This article includes sources on literature written in all of Scotland’s three languages: English, Scots, and Gaelic.