‘Tales of their own countries’: re-visioning the Scottish renaissance through the contribution of women writers: Catherine Carswell, Willa Muir and Nan Shepherd.

This doctoral thesis investigates the role of women within the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ shedding light on how their contribution was fundamental, both with regard to the literary aspect and to the critical one and showing how, until recently, it was long marginalised by critics. The thesis focuses on the role of three writers, Catherine Carswell, Willa Muir, and Nan Shepherd, showing how their creative and theoretical contribution can lead to an important re-definition of this literary movement, analysing, as Marina Camboni and Susan Stanford Friedman have suggested, not only cultural but also historical, political, social, and personal factors. The purpose of this thesis has been to emphasise how the contribution of Scottish women authors was not a casual event but a conscious effort toward the construction of Scottish modernism, and how they often challenged and questioned the role and works of the members of the ‘male Pantheon’ of contemporary Scottish writers, with whom they had many and relevant connections. The aim of this work has been to emphasise the dual challenge in looking at Scottish Modernism from a gendered perspective today: the first is, still, to re-discover or re-assess the role and works of women writers, the second is to place them as historical subjects and, more importantly, as social actors in order to integrate their experiences and stories into the geopolitical and cultural landscape of Modernism . Drawing from Susan Stanford Friedmans’ theory of locational feminism and from Marina Camboni’s theory of networking women this thesis has investigated the network(s) that these women created between them and with other male authors, their often complex relationship with Scotland and with nationalism and the hybridity and dynamicity of their work demonstrating how they successfully managed to explore their experiences, escaping from stereotypical depictions of women in a male literary environment and to emphasise their active role and the specificity of their contribution to Scottish modernism.