Neil M. Gunn: Re-imagining the Highlands

• Published in: Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959 pp. 113 - 130
• Main Author: Palmer McCulloch, Margery
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 15.05.2009
• Subjects: Adults; Art genres and movements; Art history; Arts; Biological sciences; Biology; Bodies of water; Childhood; Children; Coastal landforms; Coasts; Communications; Developmental biology; Earth sciences; Fiction; Geography; Geomorphology; Highlands; Human developmental stages; Human populations; Landforms; Literary genres; Literature; Modernist art; Narrative modes; Narratives; Novels; Persons; Physical sciences; Population studies; Seas; Social sciences; Topography
• ISBN: 0748634746; 9780748634743

A story could have been made of all this for the scholars, but in Kenn's time no teacher ever attempted it. The Vikings were a people like the Celts or the Picts, concerning whom a few facts had to be memorized. But these facts were really very difficult to memorize, because they had no bearing on anything tangible. They were sounds in the empty spaces of history.Neil M. Gunn, Highland River (1937)As discussed previously, Neil M. Gunn first came to attention as a short fiction writer, contributing stories to MacDiarmid's Scottish Nation and Northern Review magazines, and with his first novel The Grey Coast being praised by MacDiarmid as ‘something new, and big, in Scottish Literature’. A new way forward came with his third novel Morning Tide which was adopted as a Book Society Choice in late 1930. As with The Grey Coast, the social and economic context of the narrative is one of decline – the fishing is no longer profitable, the young men are emigrating and Old Hector is the only piper left in the village – but such decline is presented obliquely as a result of the narrative focus on the boy Hugh, the central character and the ‘eyes’ of the novel whose positive responses to his child's world bring the reader new perspectives on the grey coast.