Kailyard school

The Kailyard school of Scottish fiction (1880–1914) was developed in the last decades of the 19th century as a reaction against what was seen as increasingly coarse writing representing Scottish life complete with all its blemishes. It has been considered to be an overly sentimental representation of rural life, cleansed of real problems and issues that affected the people, but proved for a time extremely popular. Its name derives ultimately from the Scots "kailyaird" or "kailyard", which means a small cabbage patch (see kale) or kitchen garden, usually adjacent to a cottage; but more immediately from Ian Maclaren's 1894 book Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush whose title alludes to the Jacobite song "There grows a bonnie brier bush in our Kailyard".

Writers of the Kailyard school included J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren, J. J. Bell, George MacDonald, Gabriel Setoun, Robina F. Hardy and, S. R. Crockett.

Barrie's Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889), and The Little Minister (1891); and Crockett's The Stickit Minister (1893) are among the more lasting products of the school.

Opposition
George Douglas Brown aimed his 1901 novel The House with the Green Shutters explicitly against what he called "the sentimental slop" of the Kailyard school.

Much of Hugh MacDiarmid's work, and the Scottish Renaissance associated with him, was a reaction against Kailyardism.

Literary references
John Ashbery references the school in his book of poems, April Galleons, his protagonist lamenting mildly that "nobody I know ever talks about the Kailyard School, at least not at the dinner parties I go to".<ref>John Ashbery, Notes from the Air (2007) p. 27</ref>

See also

References

Further reading
G. Blake, Barrie and the Kailyard School'' (1951)

External links
 Kailyard School (1886-1896), The Literary Encyclopedia
 Scots Word of the Season: Kailyard, Maggie Scott, Lecturer in English Language, University of Salford, published in The Bottle Imp ezine by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

 
Category:Scottish literary movements
Category:19th-century British literature
Category:20th-century British literature