Lewis Grassic Gibbon and History. The Shameless Stone of Sisyphus
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199411759Abstract
This article is a cultural study of the writer James Leslie Mitchell / Lewis Grassic Gibbon in his historical context, the early 1930s in Scotland. It analyses especially his novels The Thirteenth Disciple, Spartacues and A Scots Quair, and their critique of the workings of ideology, its relation to faith in humanity, and its distortion of the radicalism necessary to change a sick world. A crucial image in his materialist approach to culture and politics bears a significant resemblance to the existentialist angst in Camus's Mythe de Sisyphe: it is the rock of creative faith that falls back on violent ideology every time a courageous Sisyphus tops a hill of History.
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