From the Second World War to the 1970s

While the immediate postwar period has often been considered a relatively quiet time in the development of the Scottish novel, it was in fact a productive period even if, undeservedly, many texts have since fallen out of print and therefore out of public awareness. Perhaps unsurprisingly , much postwar Scottish fiction was characterised by a strong focus on individualism and introspection, rather than on ‘state of the nation’ concerns. As Douglas Gifford has pointed out, ‘Post-war Scottish novelists found it even more difficult than their “Renaissance” predecessors to present a positive picture of Scotland in terms of their central characters and situations. There are no Chris Guthries, no heroic figures […]’. A shift began to take place in the Scottish novel, one which often involved a testing of moral boundaries, whether in terms of formal experimentalism, unsettling engagements with class, sexuality or gender expectations; in some cases a mixture of all of these. A commonality found among many Scottish novels of the postwar period, therefore, is a satiric upturning of accepted convention; one which in turn pushes the reader to self-reflexively examine their own engagement with the text. In its consideration of such concerns, this chapter will suggest that the work of many writers from the postwar to the 1970s, while diverse in their range of literary styles and approaches, nonetheless collectively contributed to generating a disruptive spirit; one which subsequently opened out the possibilities of literary representation in significant ways, engaging with philosophical ideas of the self and, at times, testing the very limits of the novel itself.