The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity: The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity, by Michael Shaw, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 320 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9781474433952

The fin-de-siècle period has been described as “one of the least well understood in Scottish cultural history” (p. 5). Although individual figures like Robert Louis Stevenson have been integrated into the wider narrative of the English literary canon, much of the writing produced in Scotland after the death of Scott has been popularly characterised as belated or insignificant. Kirstie Blair recently noted that “Victorian Scottish literature has attracted very little critical attention, with the majority of publications in Scottish literary studies, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, centred on the Romantic period or on the early twentieth-century Scottish Renaissance and beyond”.1 This is particularly true of the fin de siècle, where major literary movements like decadence have often been assumed to have passed an inward-looking and conservative Scotland by. The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity carefully reclaims the writers and artists of the late nineteenth century from such characterisations. Michael Shaw’s book convincingly locates already prominent figures like Stevenson and John Buchan within a wider network of Scottish writers and artists invested in the project of cultural revival and highly attuned to contemporary cultural movements.