Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
9 - John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots that Clutch: John Buchan, Scottish Fiction and Scotland
- 2 A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan
- 3 A Very Modern Experiment: John Buchan and Rhodesia
- 4 ‘The Ministry of Information’: John Buchan's Friendship with T. E. Lawrence
- 5 Masculinities in the Richard Hannay ‘War Trilogy’ of John Buchan
- 6 John Buchan and the Emerging ‘Post-Modern’ Fact: Information Culture and the First World War
- 7 The Spy-Scattered Landscapes of Modernity in John Buchan's Mr Standfast
- 8 The Soul's ‘Queer Corners’: John Buchan and Psychoanalysis
- 9 John Buchan, Myth and Modernism
- 10 John Buchan and the American Pulp Magazines
- 11 What Kind of Heritage? Modernity versus Heritage in Huntingtower
- 12 Living Speech, Dying Tongues and Reborn Language: John Buchan and Scots Vernacular Poetry
- 13 John Buchan in Canada: Writing a New Chapter in Canada's Constitutional History
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The extraordinary curiosity that we find in much modernist literature about myth, and the way myth erupts into, collides with or can be discovered in modern lives, is a subject on which much critical ink has been spilt. But the operative word is ‘modernist’. This palaver about my this a preoccupation routinely attributed to modernism, perhaps even constitutive of modernism. It is not, however, confined to writers of the modernist canon. This essay considers an instance of mythical writing in the fiction of a writer who, if he finds a place in the history of modern literature at all, is never, as far as I know, grouped among the modernists, the vanguard of modernity. In fact, in many respects John Buchan is just the candidate you might call upon to portray modernism's archetypal and necessary opposite or other.
While it is easy enough to line up those writers who belong to the modernist canon (T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and so on), there is very little critical agreement about where the border actually runs between the modernist enclave and its modern hinterland, or indeed whether such a border really does or should exist. The modernists do tend to be treated, by friends and enemies alike, as the aristocracy of modern literature, and either admired as the highest attainment of the culture or dismissed as an effete irrelevance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity , pp. 141 - 154Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014