Continuing the Renaissance: Little Magazines and a Late Phase of Scottish Modernism in the 1940s
As in many other avant-garde contexts in the early years of the twentieth century, little magazines were at the forefront of the modern—and modernist—Scottish literary revival initiated by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid in the years immediately after World War One, as he challenged existing outworn tradit...
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| Vydáno v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| Hlavní autor: | |
| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Anglais |
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Études écossaises
2013
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| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | As in many other avant-garde contexts in the early years of the twentieth century, little magazines were at the forefront of the modern—and modernist—Scottish literary revival initiated by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid in the years immediately after World War One, as he challenged existing outworn traditions and sought to remove Scotland and its culture from the subservient status of a provincial “North Britain”. While the originating phase of this modernist attempt to redirect the course of Scottish literary (and wider) culture had come to an end by the time of the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, a second phase, again led by little magazines, started up in the early 1940s and lasted into the next decade. The publisher William Maclellan of Glasgow was a key figure here, and as with the earlier MacDiarmid movement, this new phase of renewal was poetry-led by magazines such as Million, Poetry Scotland, and Scottish Art and Letters, which also had a strong visual art input as a result of the involvement of the painter J. D. Fergusson.This proposed paper will therefore explore the interaction between the new poetic voices and their ideological positions in these second-phase magazines and the continuities with the previous MacDiarmid-led revival which still inspired them, despite their differences. The effects of wartime conditions on the production and reception of such little magazines, and the relationship between the magazines and other new work being published in the war years and immediate post-war period will also be considered. Through examination of the extent to which a new generation of writers (and their readers) either followed or departed from the earlier movement’s prescription for renewal, the paper will ultimately attempt to evaluate the legacy of the interwar modernist revival and the extent to which MacDiarmid and his fellow reformers succeeded in transforming pre-1918 cultural expectations, and, consequently, in writing a new chapter in Scotland’s literary and political history. |
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