Introduction: renewals and revivals

Abstract

How we see literature, or a continuing cultural tradition, or even our own identity, depends upon an act of perception and hence of selection on our part. Different periods will make different selections from the available evidence according to the spirit of the times. Indeed, the music, literature and arts of the past are truly alive only because our understanding of them has to change in this way — from generation to generation, or even during the course of a single life. Literary and cultural history is especially fluid, because persuasive theories, let us say about what ‘Scottishness’ is, begin to influence how people think of themselves and hence how writers express themselves. Certainly, Scotland has expended enough effort over the centuries defending and defining a sense of national identity which has somehow refused to succumb to political or cultural pressures from her larger and more powerful neighbour to the south. The process started at least as long ago as the wars of independence in the early fourteenth century, and Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Harry’s Wallace did much to define the ‘idea’ of Scotland and to establish an independent-minded and egalitarian outlook as a characteristic part of the Scottish spirit.