R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s contribution to the political and literary life of Scotland: party, prose, and the political aesthetic

Munro, Lachlan Gow (2019) R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s contribution to the political and literary life of Scotland: party, prose, and the political aesthetic. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis examines the substantive and verifiable political and cultural legacy of the social reformer and author, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936), one of the most famous and controversial Scots of his generation. Much has been written about Graham before and after his death, in biographies, memoirs, and analyses of his large canon of essays, but there has been little analysis of his political beliefs and the influences that shaped them, and how these directed his efforts into the creation of the first party of labour in Britain, and his later involvement in the first nationalist party in Scotland. The thesis therefore seeks to uncover Graham’s philosophies through his political statements, and to extrapolate them, where possible, into the themes of his political campaigns and in his later literary works. It is thus the intention to transcend previous perspectives by looking at Graham not solely as a politician, nor an author, but as an eloquent, disquieted, principled, fervid moralist and contrarian, for whom politics and writing were fundamentally the same thing, the means by which his deeply felt moral anger could be expressed.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > History
• Supervisor's Name: MacDonald, Dr. Catriona
• Date of Award: 2019
• Depositing User: Mr Lachlan Gow Munro
• Unique ID: glathesis:2019-73017
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 13 Jun 2019 07:32
• Last Modified: 02 Aug 2022 10:30
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.73017
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/73017