Scottish Renaissance

The Scottish Renaissance was a movement in Scottish literature centered on the 1920s and 1930s that sought to revive and modernize Scots-language poetry and to reassert a distinctively Scottish literary and cultural identity within the broader currents of European Modernism, in deliberate reaction against what its central figure saw as a sentimentalized, provincial kailyard tradition in Scottish letters. Its leading figure, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, developed a literary form of Scots, synthetic Scots or Lallans, drawing on dialect, older Scots vocabulary and invention to create a modern poetic language, most fully realized in his long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). Other writers associated with the movement, including Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Edwin Muir, extended its aims into fiction and criticism, and the movement is generally credited with reviving Scots as a serious literary medium and reconnecting Scottish writing with wider European Modernist currents after a long period of relative provincialism.