Ironic mythology: reading the fictiveness of the cone-gatherers

Carruthers, G. (2017) Ironic mythology: reading the fictiveness of the cone-gatherers. In: Gifford, D. and Bicket, L. (eds.) The Fiction of Robin Jenkins: Some Kind of Grace. Series: SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature (26). Brill | Rodopi: Leiden ; Boston, pp. 37-50. ISBN 9789004337046 (doi: 10.1163/9789004342491_004)

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Publisher's URL: http://www.brill.com/products/book/fiction-robin-jenkins

Abstract

The Cone-Gatherers (1955) is a text of large symbolic import featuring an Edenic Argyllshire landscape. Into this setting pollution is poured in the form of an incipient evil agency which might either affirm the Calvinist world-view, or alternatively, could be its bleak, morbid, self-prophesying result. A wider than Scottish )Calvinist_ context also pertains, the novel clearly riffing upon John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937), with writ-large allusions to folk legend (especially the Green Man), the life of Francis of Assisi, and the classical theories of western tragedy as well as the Bible. In retrospect the alert reader might see this inter-textual exchange as proof of the profound fictiveness, the suspicious heaping up of symbolism and story, in Jenkin's novel, something that this essay will principally elaborate upon.

Item Type:Book Sections
Status:Published
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Carruthers, Professor Gerard
Authors: Carruthers, G.
Subjects:P Language and Literature > PE English
P Language and Literature > PR English literature
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > Scottish Literature
Publisher:Brill | Rodopi
ISBN:9789004337046

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