The Romantic and the Real: James Leslie Mitchell and the Search for a Middle Way

James Leslie Mitchell is remembered primarily for his trilogy A Scots Quair (1932–34), published under his better-known pseudonym, Lewis Grassic Gibbon. The Quair has long been recognized as a central work in the Scottish literary tradition and has commonly been approached in relation to realism and national identity. By reading the novel in relation to Mitchell’s earlier fiction, it is possible to see his writing as exploring the tension between realism and romance. Mitchell’s work has affinities with that of his contemporaries, especially John Cowper Powys. Both novelists replace a linear idea of human progress with ever-oscillating oppositions in order to investigate the relation between fiction and experience. This reappraisal allows Mitchell’s work to be read not only in terms of Scottish or regional fiction, but also as an important contribution to modernist debates on the value of fiction and romance in modernity.