The temptation to tell, not just a history but the ‘story’ of Scottish literature has often been a strong one. Three watershed dates – 1560, 1603 and 1707 – invite us to plot the trajectory of Scottish literature against the nation’s mutating constitutional status. The Protestant Reformation, the Union of the Crowns and the Union of the Parliaments: There is a sense in which each of these events represents a realignment and, arguably, an impairment of native cultural identity. Taken together, these events have been read as staging posts on a process of regrettable Anglicization in post-medieval Scotland. Alternatively, this timeline can be presented more positively as the story of Scotland’s growing ‘modernity’, the emergence of a peripheral European nation into the embracing lingua franca of English. The complex arguments that swirl around Scotland’s historical ‘losses’ and ‘gains’ are often coloured by particular political and cultural perspectives. We might ask, however, if these events necessarily lend themselves to one singular, overarching conclusive cultural interpretation. The Reformation has been read, most famously by twentieth-century poet Edwin Muir, as promoting an ‘alien’ English language and relegating Scots to a congeries of dialects. For Muir, this linguistic catastrophe forecloses the possibility of an integrated, nationally confident ‘Scottish literature’ worthy of the name. But does a national literature require a national language? What makes a ‘regional’ dialect unfit for literature? Muir bemoans the cultural depredations of Calvinism but ignores the vital new prose tradition that emerges with John Knox. Alongside Knox, we might class David Lyndsay, James VI, William Drummond of Hawthornden, James Thomson, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hugh MacDiarmid and Muriel Spark as writers whose works are informed by the ethos and theology of Scottish Presbyterianism. Are these writers simply to be dismissed, by the inevitable logic of Muir’s position, as a wrong turn in the river?

Walter Scott was the major novelist of the nineteenth century. ‘During the Romantic period, the “Author of Waverley” sold more novels than all the other novelists of the time put together’; a generation later he was still, ‘by several orders of magnitude, the author whose works had sold the largest number of copies in the English-speaking world.’ This popularity was accompanied by a commensurate critical prestige. The Victorians revered Scott as at once the last of the classics and the first of the moderns – the wizard who reanimated the ancient genres of ballad, epic and romance for an industrial-age reading public. His reputation stood if anything still higher outside Britain: from Russia to Italy, Ontario to Bengal, the historical novel exemplified the modernising national literary form of the novel as such. Scott’s fiction supplied a template for the epic ambitions of the next great medium of nation-making narrative, in the cinema of D. W. Griffith, and Waverley, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe and the rest continue to shape the fables of our postmodern global mass culture.

Scott’s achievement was comprehensively sidelined by the aesthetic revolutions of modernism, consolidated in Anglo-American criticism by works such as F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948) and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), which installed academic canons of moral and formal realism inhospitable to Scott’s practice. Twentieth-century taste made the Waverley Novels the literary equivalent of a Victorian municipal monument – dilapidated, unsightly, impeding the flow of traffic. The lip-service paid to Scott’s stature in the global history of the novel gave his reputation a lopsided cast: the once universally influential Great Unread, a tail without the comet. Recent decades have seen a refurbishing of that reputation, if so far confined to the academy, sustained by the new Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, a general reorientation of critical inquiry towards historicist approaches and (not least) a strong resurgence of the historical novel itself across the reading publics and credential-granting institutions of world literature.

Summing up his friend’s career to date in 1886, Henry James wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘Each of his books is an independent effort – a window opened to a different view.’ In its simplest sense, this remark recalls the experimental, adaptable attitude that Stevenson took to literary forms in a market that afforded authors new freedoms. At the start of his writing career in the 1870s, the book trade was still dominated by the standard, three-volume novel, looming large in the view of any young writer beginning a literary career. As Stevenson himself put it, ‘the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature’. But throughout Stevenson’s life, sales of the three-volume novel, the medium of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, began to fall and the ‘other forms of literature’ to take their place. With the increasing popularity and widening distribution of magazines, shorter fictions and serial publication drove the development of literature, and new literary modes began to emerge to satisfy new readerships. Not yet quite solidified into the genres we would now recognise, these modes blended with each other as authors felt unconstrained by the demands of the realist novel. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), for example, could be described as an early example of many genres: the detective work of Mr. Utterson (or ‘Mr. Seek’ as he calls himself), Henry Jekyll’s mysterious chemical experiment and the monster that is Hyde are all potent models for, respectively, the detective story, science fiction and horror, yet the novel cannot be said to correspond precisely to any one of these genres.

The concept of a ‘Scottish literature’ by its very phrasing invokes a claim to be a national literature. A collection such as the present one accepts the existence of a ‘Scottish’ literature in these terms: distinct in important respects from any other literature, and having within it qualities which express, reflect or relate to a set of experiences which are sufficiently widely shared and expressive of certain collectivities of culture, institutions or banal quotidian association that we have come to call ‘national’. What the validity or otherwise of this term is is a different matter, which I have explored elsewhere. The chapter which follows is instead aimed at teasing out a question of periodicity and aesthetic in this national literary history: the extent to which ‘Scottish’ literature partakes of European and Western literary movements which are normally taken as transcending national boundaries, and the extent to which the Scottish case inflects these in distinctive ways in the Romantic period.

In the context of the long eighteenth century, this is an important question, because – in recent years in particular – Scotland has been seen as having a key role in the European Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment has been treated as a key intellectual powerhouse, not least in the United States, where books such as Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (2004) present an extravagantly maximalist case for a national Enlightenment promoting the universal values of modern rationality while serving as the creative engine-room for the disciplines of modern thought and the achievements of modern technology. Closer to home, Alexander Broadie’s Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (2003) is currently the best-selling Cambridge Companion, and was published in Mandarin in 2010. The Scottish Enlightenment has a long and unquestioned national reach.

In a curious twist of cultural history, Scotland enjoys a ‘Renaissance’ that began in the twentieth century rather than at some point between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Denis Saurat’s term for the cultural energies of the movement associated with Hugh MacDiarmid renders the fate of earlier Scottish literature ‘curiouser’ still: an anomaly in both Scottish and European literary history. Even in the wake of a new ‘British history’ which recognises the separate and interlinked cultures of the four nations, and of renewed sympathy towards the idea of a ‘northern’ Renaissance, the depths of the literature associated, for example, with Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87), and her son, James (1566–1625) – poets themselves – remain uncharted beyond specialist critical studies. Instead, a story about an impossible, or improbable, first Scottish Renaissance is told, woven out of two historical events, often perceived as culturally calamitous: the mid-sixteenth-century Reformation, and the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Yet Edwin Muir’s powerfully emotive visions of the hollowed-out culture resulting from Scotland’s violent Reformation, for example, should not prevent us from seeing interesting redirections and reconceptualisations of artistic expression rather than its complete extinction.

The very term ‘Renaissance’ is perhaps a distorted looking-glass through which to view artistic and intellectual changes which assume different forms in different cultures. Coined by the French writer Jules Michelet in 1855, then famously used by Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization [or Culture] of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), it embodied the monumental processes of intellectual, artistic and cultural renewal or rebirth which could collectively be judged a self-conscious or purposeful negation of an earlier medium aevum or ‘middle age’. This idea of Renaissance spawns its own myth (an illuminatory Renaissance versus the medieval ‘dark ages’) but might be preferable to the alternative periodisation of ‘early modern’, which unhelpfully foregrounds the notion of a prescient, welcome ‘modernity’.

In his landmark 1935 travelogue, Scottish Journey, the poet Edwin Muir finds himself daunted and perplexed by the tremendous fact of Glasgow. On the one hand, Glasgow’s significance and scale are indisputable: the forces of industrialism that are transforming the country are most rampantly evident in the city on the Clyde, and a ‘description of Scotland which did not put Glasgow in the centre of the picture would not be a description of Scotland at all’. On the other hand, Muir frets that Glasgow is un-Scottish, being shaped more by the homogenising, transnational processes of ‘Industrialism’ than by the customary folkways of the nation:

Should Glasgow engross or escape Muir’s attention? Muir seems not to know, and his ambivalence reflects a sense of Glasgow as sui generis in the context of Scotland. Glasgow’s economic take-off, rooted in the eighteenth-century tobacco and sugar trades, and its transformation by heavy industry in the Victorian era, made it a monstrous anomaly: by 1901 nearly half of Scotland’s four and a half million people lived in the Clydeside conurbation. Glasgow was a city with its face turned westward to America, and perhaps also to Ireland, rather than to the hinterland behind it. And it was a city with a raft of intractable social problems – slum housing and overcrowding being the most pernicious – of a scale and intensity unparalleled in the rest of the country. Glasgow was indeed a place apart.

Analyses of origin are always complex – or, as Edward Said would have it, ‘beginnings’ are always ‘uncanny’, or unsettling. For one thing, their object is multiple: to recount the rise of Scottish Studies, for example, one must also account for the field’s prehistory – what was there before it developed into its modern, recognisable form. Then there are questions of territory, that is, of the place of individual works within the field and of the field itself relative to some larger academic terrain. And in the case of Scottish Studies in particular, this generic complexity is compounded by the extent that the discipline involves a nation composed of multiple languages and cultures, an ambiguous relation to conventional statehood and a significantly diasporic history.

Hence, to discuss the rise of Scottish Studies is to evoke a great many things besides, so that no short essay can do the subject justice. Of course, to some extent, the field is a monument to the purported injustice it has perpetually done itself – or so it would appear from a certain branch of its history. In 1919, G. Gregory Smith observed that Scotland’s relatively small size and coherent languages should lend themselves to ‘a general estimate’ of the nation’s literature. However, he continued, close engagement of the material reveals contrary propensities toward realism and fantasy which, ‘under the stress of foreign influence and native division and reaction’, spawn ‘a zigzag of contradictions’. But then, in a gesture befitting Hegel or Renan, or perhaps Blake, Smith unified these contraries under a banner he labelled the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, a portrait of the national spirit as Jekyll and Hyde.

Scottish writers have, at times, played a role in detective, adventure and thriller writing that is out of proportion to the size of the nation. Though Scotland played no significant part in the twentieth-century’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction, which was dominated by English and American authors, its writers were influential in establishing the genre in the late nineteenth century and can, in the early twenty-first century, count among themselves some of its most popular global practitioners. This chapter may not be able to offer a satisfactory explanation of why this is the case – unfortunately, literary criticism is rarely as tidy as fictional detective work – but it will offer an account of the somewhat punctuated evolution of crime and thriller fiction in the Scottish context in the period that runs from Conan Doyle to so-called Tartan Noir.

Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson are Scottish writers who demand attention principally because of the impact their work had on a popular writing based on action and suspense, on psychological instability and the solving of puzzles. Conan Doyle’s place in the history of detective fiction needs little elaboration. Though he took up a genre that had been established in the 1830s and 40s by Vidocq’s Mémoires, the Newgate novels and Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories, and which had been experimented with variously by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and, most successfully, by Émile Gaboriau, Conan Doyle established in the popular mind the type of the detective story in its modern form. In his Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand magazine from 1891 and in novellas such as A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Conan Doyle created a fiction that fed on the sensational elements of his predecessors’ work, featuring luminescent hellhounds bounding out of moorland mist, diabolical master criminals and dark deeds in opium dens. But it kept that sensationalism tightly bound in satisfying plots that, through Holmes’s reasoned application of observation, analysis and deduction, reduced the seemingly uncanny to the reassuringly explicable.

Though commonly viewed as definitively rural and nationalist, the Scottish Literary Renaissance was actually begun in London by an émigré community of Burnsian Scots. The Vernacular Circle of the London Robert Burns Club, set up in 1920 to save the Doric from oblivion, boasted John Buchan and Violet Jacob as honorary members. Christopher Murray Grieve (‘Hugh MacDiarmid’) was an initial sceptic, objecting in formalist tones that ‘Mere patriotism is a Caliban’s Guide to letters.’ In the early 1920s, Grieve thought any revival of the Scots vernacular could only invite cultural inferiorism and further marginalisation and was glad to be one of the movement’s ‘most indefatigably helpful enemies’. Grieve disliked what he perceived as the Kailyard inflection in the Scots poems of Charles Murray (1864–1941), whose Hamewith (1900; 1909) was enormously popular, particularly in Murray’s native north-east. Born in Alford, Aberdeenshire, Murray emigrated to South Africa in 1888 to manage a gold-mining company, rising to be Secretary of Public Works in the Transvaal. Murray’s Doric poems are often infused with an exilic sentimentality for ‘Scotland our Mither’. Character sketches of rural Aberdeenshire life, such as ‘The Whistle’ and ‘Dockens Afore His Peers’, link him tonally to William Alexander’s Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1871), but also to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932). Grieve included Murray in his journal Northern Numbers (1920–2) but later turned on him, along with other established figures such as J. M. Barrie and Neil Munro, in the Scottish Educational Journal, accusing Murray and the Doric revival of exemplifying ‘mental parochialism, a constitutional incomprehension and hatred of culture’.

The Victorian period in Scottish literature has long been viewed with embarrassment if not disdain. ‘The less said about the two generations after Scott the better’, remarked Kurt Wittig in 1955. David Craig, writing in 1961, agreed: ‘from 1825 to 1880 there is next to nothing worth attention’. Scottish Victorianism was backward-looking and parochial. The spirit of Burns, shorn of all its radicalism, hung over popular poetry anthologies such as Whistle-Binkie, first published in the 1830s and reissued with new material throughout the century. In fiction, the dominant traditions were historical romance, typified by Robert Louis Stevenson, and nostalgic rural idylls epitomised by the so-called Kailyard fiction of J. M. Barrie and Ian Maclaren. The overwhelming image was of a rural, provincial culture, escaping into a pre-industrial past. In an influential book of 1951, the novelist George Blake complained that the ‘representative writers during the nineteenth century had hardly a single word to say about the revolution that was so dramatically overtaking’ them. Instead, the printing presses across the nation were flooded with books of reminiscences, typified by E. B. Ramsay’s Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character (1857), which celebrated and lamented what Archibald Geikie termed ‘the gradual decline of national peculiarities’. The ascent of Victoria, it seemed, signalled the descent of Scottish culture.

This interpretation did not die easily. As late as 1988 a history of nineteenth-century Scottish literature opened with an essay which identified the late 1830s as ‘one of the most obvious and drastic turning points in the literary history of Scotland’ in which there was ‘a loss of cohesion and self-confidence, a decline which lasted about 50 years’. If the death of Walter Scott in 1832 signalled the end of an era of sustained cultural achievement, the departure of Thomas Carlyle for London in 1834 pointed to the death of the environment which had supported it. To Tom Nairn, ‘intellectual emigration’ in the nineteenth century emptied the country of its literary talent and left only a ‘rootless vacuum … a great “absence”’. Recent scholarship, however, has proved this conclusion to be drastically oversimplified. Research into the popular press has revealed a flourishing urban tradition of vernacular prose fiction.

In his now classic The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Experience (1964), David Daiches divides Scottish writers after the Union into two camps, arguing that ‘Those poets who did not emigrate to England and write in English in an English tradition either wrote in Scotland in English for an English audience or turned to a regional vernacular poetry in a spirit of sociological condescension, patriotic feeling, or antiquarian revival.’ Influenced by the notion of a ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ proposed in G. Gregory Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence as well as T. S. Eliot’s account of ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Daiches also suggests that writers after the Union suffered from a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ caused by thinking in one language (Scots) and writing in another (English, the language of power). Daiches’s assessment was initially important in helping to raise awareness of some of the socio-political factors influencing eighteenth-century Scottish literature and has proved extremely influential over the years as critics have grappled with its implications and revised it accordingly. In the Grammar of Empire, for example, Janet Sorensen comments that this assessment of a Scottish ‘split [schiz] mind [phrene]’ pathologises Scottish literature by positing a central, organic national identity against which Scottish national identity appears always already flawed. More recently, in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, Murray Pittock characterises post-Union Scottish writing not in terms of a lack or a splitting but in terms of doubleness: ‘Scottish doubleness was a cultural language, both participative in the British public sphere and withdrawn from it.’

Between the 1820s and the Second World War, around 2.3 million Scots emigrated. Pre-nineteenth-century Scottish emigration included, variously, a significant mining community which went off to ply its trade in Poland, pedlars and merchants across the Baltic states, the plantation of Ulster and Catholics and Jacobites exiled in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. From the nineteenth century two principal phenomena accounted for Scottish emigration: the British Empire and the Clearances. One interesting pre-Clearances moment in Scottish literature is provided by Robert Burns in his poem, ‘Address of Beelzebub’ (1786). Here, satirically, Burns’s diabolic narrator salutes the earl of Breadalbane, president of the Highland Society. This had supported landlords such as Mr Macdonald in maintaining his people in abject poverty through preventing their projected emigration from his estates of Glengary to Canada. Burns’s knowledge of diaspora was of largely exciting greater potential abroad. This too, however, was not without a darker side, as Burns seems for a period in 1786 to have contemplated going to Jamaica to work as an official in the slave plantations. This route to greater prosperity was a well-trodden journey for hundreds of Scotsmen of good education but limited prospects at home in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Burns in the end did not go, but his possible alternative life in the West Indies is well imagined in a modern novel by Andrew Lindsay, Illustrious Exile (2006).

Tobias Smollett responds to another strong element of pre-nineteenth-century Scottish diasporic experience in his novel Roderick Random (1748), partly dealing with life on board a Royal Navy ship as a surgeon (along with the tobacco and slave trades, the military was the means by which many eighteenth-century Scots were introduced to, and frequently settled in, the New World). Although not without criticism of practices in the British navy, Roderick Random is generally enthusiastic about the imperial enterprise in which Britain is involved. Smollett himself had served on a man-o’-war and he is Scotland’s first major writer to live for a large part of his life abroad, not only in England, but in the West Indies (1741–4) and in France and Italy from 1766, Smollett dying in the latter country in 1771.

This is the bleak conclusion to Elspeth Barker’s 1991 novel O Caledonia, but it can serve also as an oblique introduction to nineteenth-century Scottish Gothic. The shadowy, doom-laden figure; the shades of darkness and blackness; the sudden stab of violence, perhaps especially against women; the blank prosaism of the rabbit-skinning knife and the trouser leg when contrasted with the classical references in the previous sentence; the setting of the castle; the omnipresence of a fearsome and dominating natural world; the specific symbolisms of both ‘the north’ and ‘the sea’: all of these are features which we can find in the best-known writers of nineteenth-century Scottish Gothic, and in particular in works by Walter Scott, James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant and Robert Louis Stevenson, which will be my focus of attention in this chapter.

Attempting an assessment of medieval Scottish literature means dealing with a definition of this literature within a strongly defined national context, a topic that has drawn considerable attention in recent decades. In 1991, the journal Studies in Scottish Literature dedicated its twenty-sixth volume to ‘The Language and Literature of Early Scotland’, publishing the proceedings of the sixth conference of the International Association for Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, and providing a unique opportunity to assess the state of criticism on the subject; the volume attempted at the same time a definition of the Scottish literary canon in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. Significantly, the opening contribution of the collection, by Roderick J. Lyall, was titled ‘“A New Maid Channoun”? Redefining the Canonical in Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature’. From this point on, it was clear – something often repeated in recent histories of Scottish literature – that medieval literature written in Older Scots could be considered the starting point of national literature, the moment of unification that determined the course of the succeeding canon. Literature and nation-building are inseparable concepts when we take into consideration late medieval English literature: from John Gower onwards, the very choice of language implies a political statement. As one surveys the Scottish literary production of the same period, it appears equally concentrated on a definition of the nation, showing a unity of purpose in excess of anything in its English counterpart. The history of Scotland up to the Union of the Crowns is of course independent of English affairs, and it is impossible to take into consideration the key dates of English history, such as the Battle of Hastings or the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, and apply them to the development of the Scottish nation: one must take into account different historical moments, and thus find different time boundaries.

The introduction to Alexander MacDonald’s 1751 Aiseirigh na Seann Chànain Albannaich [The Resurrection of the Old Scottish Language], the first secular publication in vernacular Scottish Gaelic, engages in celebration, advertisement and rapprochement. Coming only five years after the Battle of Culloden, the introduction carefully makes the case (in English) for Gaelic literature to be understood both in terms of classical and historical precedents, and as a part of the fabric of Scottish cultural life. MacDonald presents his collection of poems as entertainment for those who can read Gaelic, and a possible encouragement for those who cannot to learn; this may happen, he argues, if readers can be brought to see that Gaelic

MacDonald also proposes a future anthology, a