Unit 19: Literature – prose

Introduction

In this unit, you will learn about prose in the Scots language. There are innumerable documents in Scots dealing with matters of court, law, diplomacy and (in modern times, what we would call) cultural criticism. Since this unit deals with literary prose, you will focus on prose fiction, both short stories and novels. Prose fiction has been written in Scots for centuries but the most crucial era for this literature is in that period where oral culture, and written, print-generated culture, overlap. It is tempting to think that one superseded the other, but this is simply not true. Everyone tells stories verbally, even today.

The art of storytelling comes from ancient times and precedes writing, but when song- and story-collectors began their work seriously and transformed their collected material into written and then printed work, they co-existed with prose-fiction, continuing in the oral tradition, as you have learned in unit 13. One of the great twentieth-century collectors, Hamish Henderson, referred to this as ‘the carrying stream’ and it complements our sense of written prose in Scots. The historical significance of this period, mainly from the 18^th into the 19^th centuries and continuing, is that at its start, it coincided with the English language claiming an increasing authority in the context of the British Empire. Scots as a written and printed language was eclipsed in some crucial respects by English. It wasn’t superseded or killed off, instead Scots speech maintained a vital currency of communication even while the English language took the central position of authority in the narrative prose of most published works.

You are going to study two crucial examples that seem to run counter to this general truth: Walter Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet. Then you are going to consider the major breakthrough made by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in the 1930s in his trilogy of novels collected as A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. You are going to weigh the counter-arguments for writing in English and Scots proposed by Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid in their confrontation in 1936 and its consequence in 1940. Then finally, you will look at the situation as it has developed since the 1980s to the 21^st century. There are four aspects you will explore closely as listed below.

Important details to take notes on throughout this unit:

• the narrator and the narrative: who utters the words in the Scots language and what is the authority of her or his narrative
• the the relation between storytelling/the short story and the novel as forms of prose literary fiction
• the relation between English and Scots in literary prose fiction and how has it changed from the 18^th century till now
• changes in the 1930s and the lasting effect these have had on literary prose fiction since then.