Douglas Gifford's Scott-land: from Enlightenment to Renaissance

The oeuvre of the late Douglas Gifford challenges some of the central orthodoxies in modern Scottish literature: the identification of Scott as a romantic; the perception of a Victorian and Edwardian trough embodied in evasions of contemporary social realities, whether in post-romantic historical escapism or the arcadian swerve of kailyard; and the conception of the inter-war Renaissance as a revolution against the sentimentality which supposedly preceded it. Gifford invites us to question these received ideas and to rethink the major turning points in Scotland's modern literary history. Yet Gifford's revisionism was polite and unobtrusive, and because of this the dramatic implications of his work have yet to be fully appreciated. Moreover, it is unclear whether Gifford ever wholly abandoned the essentialist assumptions that his scholarship implicitly undermined.