Nation and Nationalism

Some of the most enduring preoccupations of Scottish literary and cultural criticism during the twentieth century derive from the politics of nationalism. Should Scotland strive towards outright political autonomy and national sovereignty, or are its best interests served through continued incorporation within the British state? More recently the question has altered slightly: how should we read the devolution settlement in 1997? A halfway house on the road to independence? Or the final fix of a British Government attempting to shore up a crumbling union? In our introduction we saw T. M. Devine argue for a sense of causality, between the invigorating energy of contemporary Scottish literature on the one hand and the revived fortunes of post-1979 nationalism on the other. This type of link, between culture and politics, has been endorsed on a number of occasions by various critics. In an essay published in 1996 Ian A. Bell claims: ‘the tremendous outpouring of fiction from Scotland in the last twenty years can be seen as offering a radical literature of resistance and reclamation.’1 Exactly what this literature was resisting and reclaiming remains open to debate. Liam McIlvanney assumes a similar tone: ‘[B]y the time the Parliament arrived [in 1999], a revival in Scottish fiction had been long underway […] Without waiting for the politicians, Scottish novelists had written themselves out of despair.’2