George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

Linden Bicket is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Divinity in New College, at the University of Edinburgh. Originally from Ayrshire, she was awarded her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2012. She has published widely on George Mackay Brown, and her research focuses on patterns of faith and skepticism in the fictive worlds of story, film, and theatre

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsChapter 1: The Scottish Catholic Literary ImaginationChapter 2: A Biography of FaithChapter 3: MaryChapter 4: MagnusChapter 5: The Nativity of ChristEpilogue: The Last ThingsWorks Cited

Brown’s life-long artistic commit-ment to place and locality (Orkney) and commitment to exploring whole-ness (which is related to holiness) make for fascinating reading, as does the author’s expert analysis of Brown’s aesthetic use of pre-Reformation history and commitment to offering his reader hope and the prospect of the redemption of the secular/profane... Bicket has whetted this reviewer’s appetite for a future definitive text from her hand detailing the full range of exponents of the Catholic imagination in Scotland over the entire twentieth-century and beyond, but whatever the future cultural production of Catholic artists and writers in the twenty-first century, what seems assured is that its reception by a scholar of Bicket’s talent and judgement means it will be in safe hands.