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Nineteenth-century Scottish literature represents a far richer field than a previously negative version of Scottish literary history suggested. Recent revisionist exercises unearthing this achievement, especially of a "regional" nature, show dynamic engagement with many pressing local, national and international themes and issues. The reassessment of nineteenth-century Scottish literature ought to cause also the reappraisal of the effects of the Scottish Enlightenment in the period immediately prior to this period and the milieu of Scottish modernism (or "the Scottish Renaissance") in the early twentieth century, which has greater continuity with the nineteenth-century period than has often been thought. The nineteenth century sees Scotland continuing to have a literature of both national and international importance.
Keywords: Revisionist disinterment; fiction of alienation; rural fiction; religious scepticism; national scepticism; gender writing; internationalism; parody.
This chapter seeks to question certain orthodoxies of literary history with regard to later nineteenth-century and fin de siècle achievement in Scotland, and its formative influence upon "The Scottish Renaissance" of the years between the first and second world wars.1 I begin with an admission of previous failure. In the late 1980s I edited The History of Scottish Literature: Nineteenth Century (Gifford 1988), the third volume of the Aberdeen University press four-volume edition. This proved to be a learning experience, but one which is far from being complete, and one which has in the years since left me feeling (as many editors must feel) that I would like to do it again. Current revaluation of Scottish history and literature is moving with great rapidity; and I recognise now the limitations ofthat volume. For all that it gave perhaps unusual emphasis to writers like James Hogg, John Gait, George MacDonald, and indicated the many areas which called for urgent research, such as the late nineteenth-century popular press, as editor I failed to recognise sufficiently the achievement of women like Susan Ferner and Margaret Oliphant, or to place significantly in the centre of the period the huge figures of Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller; or to emphasise sufficiently the achievement of poets like the post-Burns radicals, such as Alexander Wilson, Alexander Rodger, John Mitchell and Alexander McGilvray; or the later nineteenth-century Dundee disciple of Walt Whitman, James Young Geddes; or John Davidson, or the major and deeply...