This lively new study is the very first book to offer an absorbing history of the uncharted territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and creative vision. By focusing on one of the best known of Scotland's literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown's writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. The book provides sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown's corpus and includes detailed comparisons between Brown's writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Flannery O'Connor. This timely book reveals that Brown's Catholic imagination extended far beyond the 'small green world' of Orkney and ultimately embraced a universal human experience.

Prizes

Short-listed for Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize 2018

Brown’s life-long artistic commit-ment to place and locality (Orkney) and commitment to exploring whole-ness (which is related to holiness) make for fascinating reading, as does the author’s expert analysis of Brown’s aesthetic use of pre-Reformation history and commitment to offering his reader hope and the prospect of the redemption of the secular/profane... Bicket has whetted this reviewer’s appetite for a future definitive text from her hand detailing the full range of exponents of the Catholic imagination in Scotland over the entire twentieth-century and beyond, but whatever the future cultural production of Catholic artists and writers in the twenty-first century, what seems assured is that its reception by a scholar of Bicket’s talent and judgement means it will be in safe hands. -- Paul Gilfillan, Queen Margaret University * Scottish Church History *
Bicket mounts a persuasive, well-researched, and elegant argument for the centrality of Brown’s faith to his writing. George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination will undoubtedly reshape many readers’ perceptions of Brown, and is a milestone in the critical reception of his work. Just as importantly, however, it suggests new directions for the study of modern Scottish literature... it is a refreshingly original analysis, and deserves to be read by a wide audience. -- Timothy C. Baker, University of Aberdeen * Scottish Literary Review *
Bicket mounts a persuasive, well-researched, and elegant argument for the centrality of Brown’s faith to his writing. George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination will undoubtedly reshape many readers’ perceptions of Brown, and is a milestone in the critical reception of his work. Just as importantly, however, it suggests new directions for the study of modern Scottish literature... it is a refreshingly original analysis, and deserves to be read by a wide audience. -- Timothy C. Baker, University of Aberdeen * Scottish Literary Review *
This is a remarkably illuminating and involving book: an incisive close reading of the work of a relatively neglected (and underrated) twentieth-century Scottish writer, which at the same time offers a series of profound meditations on the nature of the Catholic literary imagination, and its relationship to history and place… Bicket’s substantial achievement is to show how the universal appeal and relevance of his work comes about because, not in spite, of its total immersion in the landscape, legends and history of a small island community. -- Peter Marshall, University of Warwick * The Innes Review *

Linden Bicket is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Divinity in New College, at the University of Edinburgh. Originally from Ayrshire, she was awarded her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2012. She has published widely on George Mackay Brown, and her research focuses on patterns of faith and skepticism in the fictive worlds of story, film, and theatre