George Blake (novelist)

George Blake (1893–1961) was a Scottish journalist, literary editor and novelist. His The Shipbuilders (1935) is considered a significant and influential effort to write about the Scottish industrial working class.[1][2] "At a time when the idea of myth was current in the Scottish literary world and other writers were forging theirs out of the facts and spirit of rural life, Blake took the iron and grease and the pride of the skilled worker to create one for industrial Scotland."[3] As a literary critic, he wrote a noted work against the Kailyard school of Scottish fiction; and is taken to have formulated a broad-based thesis as cultural critic of the "kailyard" representing the "same ongoing movement in Scottish culture" that leads to "a cheapening, evasive, stereotyped view of Scottish life."[4] He was well known as a BBC radio broadcaster by the 1930s.

  1. ^ Burgess, Moira. "Blake, George". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/40288. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ Michael Lynch, ed. (2011). The Oxford Companion to Scottish History. OUP Oxford. p. 159. ISBN 9780199693054.
  3. ^ Elliot, Robert David (1977) The Glasgow novel. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Archived 2019-03-22 at the Wayback Machine at p. 143
  4. ^ Andrew Nash, (2004) William Robertson Nicoll, the Kailyard novel and the question of popular culture. Scottish Studies Review, 5 (1). pp. 57–73. ISSN 1745-3186 at note 2.