Kailyard: A New Assessment

by Ian Campbell

This book sets out to isolate and discuss certain aspects of the phenomenon known as "Kailyard". While the term normally is applied to writers of sentimental fiction in the late nineteenth century, the underlying assumption of this study is that Kailyard is not restricted to Barrie, Crockett and Maclaren - and this is not in any sense a history of their work. Rather it is an examination of attitudes to the past, to Scottish identity, to religious and cultural controversy, through works of literature as diverse as Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's famous trilogy A Scots Quair.

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Ian Campbell was educated in Switzerland and Scotland. He is emeritus Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh and has wide interests in Scottish fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

He is the author of biographical works on Thomas Carlyle as was associate editor of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Carlyle Letters. His Kailyard was published in 1981, and a re-issue of J.M. Barrie's A Window in Thrums in 2005.