A Short Survey of Classic Scottish Writing by Alasdair Gray
Posted in Alasdair Gray, Reading Reviewed, Scottish Fiction at 14:00 on 5 August 2013
Canongate Pocket Classics, 2001, 159 p
The book is diminutive in size (16 cm tall, 11 wide) but not content. It rattles through the history of writing in and by Scots from Anglo-Saxon times till the early 20th century. It focuses on what Gray – and most other commentators – consider to be the best in the tradition; hence classic in the book’s title. More recent Scottish writing is deliberately excluded as being too close for a proper perspective.
Several of the works mentioned in the survey were of course overlooked or even derided on first publication and it is only with time their merits have come to be recognised. Overall, though, the literary output from this small nation is shown fit to stand comparison with any.
Tags: Alexander Broadie, Allan Ramsay, Anglo-Saxon, Bernard de Linton, Christopher Murray Grieve, David Lindsay, Gavin Douglas, George Douglas Brown, Hugh MacDiarmid, J Leslie Mitchell, J MacDougall Hay, James Hogg, John Barbour, John Galt, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Other fiction, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Robert Henryson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish Fiction, Thomas Urquhart, Tobias Smollett, Walter Scott, William Dunbar
Projected New Year Reading – A Son of the Rock -- Jack Deighton
3 January 2014 at 20:35
[…] read is J MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie, which lies on my desk as I write this but, according to Alasdair Gray, has the “worst first chapter that ever introduced a novel worth reading.” I consider […]
Gillespie by J MacDougall Hay – A Son of the Rock -- Jack Deighton
25 July 2014 at 23:38
[…] with which it has some thematic similarities. Alasdair Gray describes Gillespie as having “the worst first chapter that ever introduced a novel worth reading.” The chapter is indeed overwrought, and overwritten, but lasts less than two […]