Reassessing John Buchan:

Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps

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Editor: Kate Macdonald

This is the first collection of edited essays on the novelist John Buchan (1875–1940), author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Witch Wood (1927) and Sick Heart River (1940) among many other works. Eighteen established scholars reconsider Buchan’s writing and reputation from the perspective of the twenty-first century.

Reassessing John Buchan examines all Buchan’s major fiction and non-fiction writing, and builds on an increasing interest from the academic world in positioning Buchan as a strong creative force in Scottish and English literature, politics and public life, from the fin-de-siècle to the Second World War. Several of his key works are examined from multiple perspectives, and new research is incorporated into established traditions.

Sample pages

• Reassessing John Buchan: Introduction
• Reassessing John Buchan: Index

Readership

Twentieth-Century Literature, Scottish Studies

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Cultural Roots
1 John Buchan and Calvinism – the Rev J C G Greig
2 Buchan and the Classics – Michael and Isobel Haslett
3 ‘Twin loyalties’: John Buchan’s England – David Goldie
4 Buchan, Sport and Masculinity – Simon Glassock
5 John Buchan and the Creation of the Springbok Warrior – Bill Nasson

Part II: Divided Loyalties
6 John Buchan and the South African War – Michael Redley
7 John Buchan and the First World War: Fact into Fiction – Hew Strachan
8 Buchan and the Pacifists – Nathan Waddell
9 John Buchan, America and the ‘British World’, 1904–1940 – Peter Henshaw
10 Islam and the East in John Buchan’s Novels – Ahmed K al-Rawi
11 Conquistadors: Buchan's Businessmen – H E Taylor

Part III: Literary Art
12 ‘A fraud called John Buchan’: Buchan, Joseph Conrad and Literary Theft – Douglas Kerr
13 Aphrodite rejected: Archetypal Women in Buchan’s Fiction – Kate Macdonald
14 John Buchan: Politics, Language and Suspense – Alan Riach
15 Buchan’s Supernatural Fiction – Paul Grant
16 The Anarchist’s Garden: Politics and Ecology in John Buchan’s Wastelands – John Miller
17 Tracing The Thirty-Nine Steps – Tony Williams

Related titles

• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part VII: Joseph Conrad, Henry Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling by their Contemporaries

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