Whose history, which novel?: Neil M. Gunn and the Gaelic Idea

Abstract

This article examines the radical approach to narrative that the novelist Neil M. Gunn takes in his 1930s novel of the Highland Clearances, Butcher's Broom. It places Gunn's aesthetics in the context of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's conceptual "Gaelic Idea" and suggests that Gunn is also engaging with a wider questioning in British literature at that time of models of leadership.