John Sutherland

Lewis Grassic Gibbon (the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell) is put forward as his country’s great 20th-century novelist: the Scottish D.H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on A Scots Quair (‘quire’ – or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’, Mearns being an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation of 1975. This cycle of novels follows the career of a Scotswoman, Chris Guthrie, from childhood on a croft in the North-Eastern coastlands, through the disruption of the First World War and two marriages, to middle age in a soulless city, ‘Dundon’, which combines repugnant features of Aberdeen and Dundee. The first segment, Sunset Song, is regarded in Scotland as a national classic and is studied in schools and universities. Gibbon remains a blind spot for most English readers. Shamefully, he has no entry in the DNB, a distinction he yields to such maestri as Edgar Wallace and Elinor Glyn.’

Ask what has been the single greatest influence on literary research since the Sixties and the answer might be the Xerox machine, the jumbo jet or Jacques Derrida. Ask what will transform literary research in the next ten years and a likely answer is The English Poetry Full-Text Database. This project, whose three serial instalments will be complete this summer, has reportedly clocked up almost a hundred sales. That may not seem a lot, until you multiply it by the unit price of £30,000 (£5000 cheaper if you got in early). Chadwyck-Healey is a commercial publisher and the sales figures are now well past breakeven into substantial profit. More important, enough databases are available for the establishment of an academic information infrastructure – user networks, newsletters, bulletin boards, help groups and team research projects. All English departments in the UK will have at least one colleague who is nagging the library to buy it or is actually using it.

According to an embittered Steinbeck, literary criticism is ‘a kind of ill-tempered party game in which nobody gets kissed’. Twenty-five years after his death he receives a big wet one in the shape of Jay Parini’s biography, which comes with much fanfare designed to rehabilitate him as one of America’s great writers. A handsome ‘Steinbeck award’ has been set up by the writer’s widow; a South Bank Show has been tied in; ‘a year-long marketing campaign by Mandarin promoting Steinbeck’s backlist’ has been launched.

Scott Bradfield is a campus novelist. Still just under forty, he taught for five years at the University of California at Irvine while getting his PhD in American literature. He then took a job at a worthy but less prestigious school – Storrs University in Connecticut, where he now teaches English. While earning his degree and his bread in the classroom. Bradfield has, over the last ten years, put together an impressive corpus of fiction comprising two novels and a collection of short stories. All his long and short fiction is set in California, the quintessential place: ‘California is America squared,’ one of his characters says. ‘It’s the place where you go to find more America than you ever thought possible.’ The more astringent New England milieu seems not yet to have penetrated into Bradfield’s fiction.’