Ploughing the glen: Nation and rural representation in twentieth century Scottish literature

This dissertation analyzes the image of the rural community in 20 th century Scottish writing and suggests the important implications these various representations have for the political and cultural identity of the modern Scottish nation. The study asks how the changing image of rural life, its symbolic tradition, have been altered by broader social discourses such as national self-awareness.;In Scotland's case, the importance of the rural image is strategic in the country's struggle for a unique identity in the face of the dominating influence of its larger southern neighbour, England. Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature clearly makes the argument that in valorizing the "provincial" within Scottish works, authors such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, among others have attempted to show a fundamental difference between the two neighbouring nations and to assert a national identity which was independent of Britain. This study adds to Crawford's observations by examining precisely how literary constructions of the rural community have been used to accentuate, inscribe and create a strategy of difference in twentieth century Scottish literature.;Arguing from a cultural-material perspective, this study considers the historical relationship between the literary rural image within a variety of texts and, in turn, the range of critical receptions (journalistic, academic, popular, political) they have received throughout four formative periods in Scotland's recent past. As Timothy Brennan sums up in Nation and Narration , the process of nation-building relies on a choice among fictions: "Nations, then, are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role" (49). This thesis shows precisely which fictions have been written, promoted and discussed in portraying the rural Scottish community. The paper argues chiefly that the rural image is an important site of production for definitions of what it means to be "Scottish." How various receptions of this rural image serve a descriptive and organizing function in the ever-changing perception of Scottish identity is the focus of the dissertation.