Product Description

From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland’s rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature. In Scotland’s Books poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish writing and its relationship to the country’s history. Stretching from the medieval masterpiece of St Columba’s Iona - the earliest surviving Scottish work - to the imaginative, thriving world of twenty-first-century writing with authors such as Ali Smith and James Kelman, this outstanding collection traces the development of literature in Scotland and explores the cultural, linguistic and literary heritage of the nation. It includes extracts from the writing discussed to give a flavour of the original work, full quotations in their own language, previously unpublished works by authors and plenty of new research. Informative and readable, this is the definitive guide to the marvellous legacy of Scottish literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179117 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 830 pages

About the Author
Robert Crawford was born in Lanarkshire in 1959 and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. He is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His Selected Poems was published by Jonathan Cape in 2005 and he is author of six other collections of poetry. His many other books of criticism and literary history include Devolving English Literature (second edition, 2000) and The Modern Poet (2001). In 2006 Penguin Classics published The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, which he edited with Mick Imlah. Robert Crawford has read and lectured widely in Britain and North America.

Customer Reviews

Go read this
This is a history of literature written by a poet, and it reads like a picaresque novel. Robert Crawford has a stack of work to his credit, including a life of Burns and the Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. He brings it all together in this tour de force which is lichtsome, generous and unprejudiced. He works by building up sketches and vignettes of each writer or group, and presenting it to us as a collage. He is interested in post-modern themes about identity, displacement and the mutability of perspectives, but don't let that fleg you - he makes ideas amazingly accessible while having a laugh at the same time. The sometimes scary Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg is "a marvellous pas de deux of self and other". Barrie, in spite of Kailyard tendencies, "retains an insistent modernity" in Peter Pan with its gendered identity switches. "Playfulness" is one of the themes he loves to pick out, and his linguistic grasp enables him to spot links, for example between Barrie and MacDiarmid, despite MacDiarmid's visceral hatred of the Barrie school of whimsy. I'll go and read some Stevenson, Galt and Fergusson as a result of reading this book. Oh, and Mrs Oliphant, Willa Muir and Kathleen Jamie too, because women writers hadn't been invented when I did Higher English at Forfar Academy in 1954.

More than just a History of Scot Lit
Very often, the history of a country's literature is a dutiful, chronological trawl through a list of the usual suspects. This book is much, much more. Robert Crawford relates the literature to the history of Scotland. When you read this book you are also witnessing the making of Scotland as a country. Extracts are given(often in the original Latin or Gaelic)and then you can read the text for yourself. The effect is to make you want to read on.
Crawford's style is wonderfully engaging. Discusing Covenanting times in the 17th century, Crawford notes:
"Then as now, though, not everyone liked God."
On Burns, his observations are acute:
" He was happy to introduce himself in print as a local 'obscure, nameless Bard'. But he made sure his name was on the title page of his first book".
This is a book to be savoured, to be sipped like a good wine. It is a vintage which can only improve.