George MacKay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

This lively new study is the very first book to offer an absorbing history of the virgin territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and practical creative vision. By focussing on one of the best-known of Scotland’s literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the uniquely Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown’s writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. The book gives sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown’s corpus, and includes detailed comparisons between Brown’s writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and Flannery O’Connor. This timely book places Brown’s literary vision in a larger frame of reference beyond Scotland, while identifying the special place Brown occupies as a Scottish Catholic writer.