James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was born #OTD, 13 Feb. Author of SUNSET SONG – & many other titles from historical fiction to science fiction – he is one of the most important Scottish writers of the 20th century
A 🎂 🧵…
1/9
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #HistoricalFiction #ScienceFiction #LewisGrassicGibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Uncovering the morning star
“The ambiguity of authority & reliability in narration, in Scots or English, is central to Hogg, Galt, Stevenson, many others, but in Gibbon’s trilogy it is utterly deconstructed”
—Alan Riach: the influence of Gibbon on contemporary Scottish literature
2/9
https://www.thenational.scot/news/15550316.lewis-grassic-gibbon-uncovering-the-morning-star/
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage
“Not only did he invent a sentence structure that works like breath through the body of the reader, and a kind of Scottish English that’s simultaneously rich and spare, but [A SCOTS QUAIR is] a formally stunning and cunning work of art”
—Ali Smith in 2019, on James Leslie Mitchell / Lewis Grassic Gibbon
3/9
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/29/ali-smith-books-that-made-me
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage
SUNSET SONG: a Scottish Gift to German Readers
Regina Erich compares the original German translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A SCOTS QUAIR trilogy published in the GDR between 1970 & 1986, with its more recent republication in a unified Germany
4/9
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2019/12/sunset-song-a-scottish-gift-to-german-readers/
#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #modernism #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #translation #German #EastGermany #GDR
“When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus & unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of THE REPUBLIC of Plato hidden in his breast.”
Ian Campbell discusses the vivid realisation of a slave revolt in Mitchell’s SPARTACUS (1933)
5/9
Why Everybody Needs Smeddum
“The heroine, Meg Menzies, is Gibbon’s answer to Austen’s Mrs Bennet. In fact, she works as a kind of anti-Mrs Bennet.”
—Graeme Trousdale on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic short story “Smeddum”
6/9
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2007/05/why-everybody-needs-smeddum/
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage #shortstory #shortfiction
