Dr Corey Gibson
Visiting Research Fellow, January - April 2025
Home institution: University of Glasgow
Corey Gibson is lecturer in 20th-century Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He was Assistant Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Groningen between 2014 and 2018, and he has held fellowships at Buffalo, Virginia, and Berkeley. Corey has published on balladry and critical theory, folk revivalism, working-class literature, Marxist thought and Scottish culture, flyting, war poetry, anonyms, and curricula and the canon. Ongoing projects range from representations of labour in modern Scottish fiction to 'Weird Scotland', psychoanalysis, and fairy lore.
Project title: Folk after Folk: Peasant Afterlives in Scottish Writing, 1890-1999
Why did folk culture thrive in twentieth-century Scotland? To what uses was it put? What kind of pasts and futures did it conjure up?
By the turn of the century antiquarians had been anxiously collecting and curating for generations already, each sure that theirs was the last opportunity to capture this inheritance before it was lost. In this vein the minister of the ending of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1934) famously memorialises those villagers lost to the War as 'the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk', to be known by their descendants only 'as a memory in a song'. The peasantry no longer represented a major social class formation in Scotland, its final holdouts were thought to have died in the trenches, or else become proletarians. But their afterlives proliferated.
It was nothing new for the foreboding that attends folk culture to lend it a certain political potency. But what form did this take in the twentieth century, when the historical dislocation that alienated folk-as-culture from the folk-as-class-formation seemed so absolute? From the fin-de-siècle Celtic Revival to the devolved Scottish Parliament, this project sets out to understand the history of folk after folk in Scottish writing. It focusses in turns on the comparative mythology of J G Fraser (1854-1941) and F Marian McNeill (1885-1973); the historical fiction of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) as compared to her peers; post-war folk revivalism; the traveller memoirs of, for example, Betsy Whyte (1919-1988); and adaptations of the ballad tradition, from Jeannie Robertson (1908-1975) to Helen Adam (1909-1993). These uses and abuses of folk culture often advocate continuities and tradition, and often times they insist on the need for violent ruptures and breaks. Some advance liberatory causes - socialism, feminism, anti-colonialism; others naturalise established hierarchies; and some do both at once. This project argues that much of contemporary Scottish culture and politics, for good and ill, can be understood through the tangled histories of an always anachronistic and historically-dislocated 'folk'.