Edinburgh Napier University

  The Scottish literary renaissance is a paradox. Imagining Scottish history as a series of catastrophes – Reformation, Union, Enlightenment, industrialisation – the renaissance sought rebirth in the nation's cultural past. Critics usually locate such inconsistencies in Hugh MacDiarmid's positions; David Goldie, for one, argues that the poet's work presents an ‘uneasy combination of revolutionary and reactionary impulses’. However, as Tom Nairn points out, ‘the dilemma of nationalist movements is that they have to gaze backwards […] in order to leap forward’. This chapter surveys the work of MacDiarmid and other key contributors to the literature of the period and finds that the renaissance's paradoxes developed from its liminal nature as a movement for cultural renewal caught between rural roots and urban modernity, belief and secularity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, writing in Scots or English. Consideration of key themes – origins and aims, language, rurality, religion, and politics – reveals that the renaissance's contradictions reflect what Nairn described as the Janus‐faced nature of nationalism, which looks to the past in order to create a national future while at the same time repudiating parts of that history.