Research Output
Introduction: ‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel
  While ‘community’ as a concept has come under increasing attack in a neoliberal era, it has remained in Scotland a mythic, though not unexamined, signifier of resistance to perceived threats to national identity. Community, central to the Scottish novel since the Kailyard, continues to be a prevalent theme in the many important novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored here. Yet, while often disturbingly oppressive in tenor, many of these representations of community actually attack the myth of Scottish communalism to critique, and often expose as forms of madness, the conventional values of social class, capitalism, patriarchy, and religion.

  • Date:

    31 December 2016

  • Publication Status:

    Published

  • Publisher

    Brill Rodopi

  • DOI:

    10.1163/9789004317451_002

  • Dewey Decimal Classification:

    800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism

Citation

Lyall, S. (2016). Introduction: ‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel. In S. Lyall (Ed.), Community in Modern Scottish Literature (1-24). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004317451_002

Authors

Editors

Keywords

Community; Scotland; myth; Kailyard; commercialism; The House with the Green Shutters; Calvinism; madness; class; Sunset Song; Imagined Corners; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; capitalism; Lanark; Trainspotting; Tales from the Mall; Scottish politics;

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