Notes
Introduction
1 Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle
upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), (p.27).
2 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 1997), (p.2).
3 The 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' refers to the concept of a split personality, usually at
tributed to literary texts such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Confessions of a Justi
fied Sinner. The concept originates in G. Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature: Charac
ter and Influence (1919). It has subsequently been adopted by many writers and critics,
including Muir and MacDiarmid. This 'split personality' is often defended as a par
ticularly Scottish trait, an essential characteristic of both 'the nation' and 'its people'.
Although it seems peculiarly romantic and out of date, it is nonetheless still upheld by
some contemporary Scottish critics.
4 For a discussion of 'strategic essentialism' see Spivak's The Post-Colonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
5 Gerry Smyth, 'Irish Studies, Postcolonial Theory and the "New" Essentialism', Irish
Studies Review, Vol. 7, No.2 (1999), pp.211-220, (p.212).
6 In The Living Stream, Edna Longley similarly warns against the possible 'fossilisation'
of Irish national identity. (TLS, 176).
7 Quoted in John S. Rickard (ed.), Irishness and (Post)Modernism (London & Toronto:
Bucknell University Press, 1994), (p.15).
8 Describing her own resistance to Nationalist narratives, Longley writes: 'My own
critical approach owes something, though I hope not everything, to a particular back
ground. Autobiographical angles on history seem as inescapable in Irish criticism as in
Irish literature. So a few years ago, like the man who found out he had been speaking
prose all his life, I realised that I might be a 'revisionist' literary critic. Revisionism is
a shorthand and quasi-abusive term for historical studies held to be at odds with the
founding ideology of the Irish Free State (Republic of Ireland since 1948). Whether
malign historians have indeed caused subsidence under the Nationalist grand narrative,
or whether its foundations have always quaked, I was brought up in one of the cracks
that are now highly visible.' (TLS, p. 10).
9 Here Kearney refers specifically to Lyotard's Peregrinations and the concept of small
narratives: 'To the extent that we can speak here of a political or ethical community, it
151
152 Notes
is one which "always remains in statu nascendi or morendi, always keeping open the
issue of whether or not it actually exists".' (PI, 63).
10 To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated
in that familiar division of the social life into private and the public spheres... In that
displacement, the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily,
the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as
divided as it is disorienting... In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes
visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary
and social effects of enforced social accommodation or historical migrations and cul
tural relocations... The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-
home, the home-in-the-world.' Homi K. Bhabha, 'The World and the Home' in
McClintock, Mufti and Shohat (eds.) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Post-
colonial Perspectives (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), pp.445-455, (p.445).
Chapter 1
11 Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (London:
George Routledge and Sons Ltd, 1936), (p.13)
12 Joy Hendry, 'Editorial', Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.l).
13 'The pre-requisite of an autonomous literature is a homogenous language... A com
mon language of this kind can only be conceived, it seems to me, as an achievement
continuously created and preserved by the highest spiritual energy of a people: the
nursing ground and guarantee of all that is best in its thought and imagination: and
without it no people can have any standard of literature. For this homogenous language
is the only means yet discovered for expressing the response of a whole people, emo
tional and intellectual, to a specific body of experience peculiar to it alone, on all the
levels of thought from discursive reason to poetry. And since some time in the six
teenth century Scotland has lacked such a language.' (SS, 19-20).
14 'In an organic literature poetry is always influencing prose, and prose poetry; and their
interaction energises them both. Scottish poetry exists in a vacuum; it neither acts on
the rest of literature nor reacts to it; and consequently it has shrunk to the level of
anonymous folk-song. Hugh MacDiarmid has recently tried to revive it by impregnat
ing it all with all the contemporary influences of Europe one after another, and thus
galvanise it into life by a series of violent shocks. In carrying out this experiment he
has written some remarkable poetry; but he has left Scottish verse very much where it
was before... Scots poetry can only be revived, that is to say, when Scotsmen begin to
think naturally in Scots. The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of the whole lan
guage, which finally means the lack of a whole mind'. (SS, 21-22).
Notes 153
15 T.S. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism' in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber,
1999), pp.23-37, pp. 23-24.
16 Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1954), pp. 91-92
17 Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1999), p.225.
18 Alan Bold, 'An Open Letter on the Closed Mind', Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.2).
19 'An Open Letter on the Closed Mind', (p.2).
20 Alasdair Gray, 'A Modest Proposal for By-Passing a Predicament' Chapman 35/36
(1983), (p.9).
21 William Power, Literature and Oatmeal: What Literature has meant to Scotland (Lon
don: George Routledge and Sons, 1935), p.174.
22 In Landscape and Light: Essays by Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair MacLeery (ed.), (Aber
deen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p.85.
23 See Edward J Cowan and Richard Finlay with William Paul, Scotland since 1688:
Struggle for a Nation (London: Cima Books, 2000), p.74.
24 Ian Campbell, Kailyard (Edinburgh: The Ramsay Head Press, 1981), p.9.
25 Ibid, p.11.
26 Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.30.
27 Power, Literature and Oatmeal, p. 183.
28 JWtf,p.l81.
29 See for example The Modern Scot edited by J.H. Whyte, MacDiarmid's Scottish
Chapbook and William Power's Scots Observer.
30 Anonymous, 'Post-War Scotland: A Letter to a P.E.N. Delegate', The Modern Scot,
Vol. V, No. 1-2, June 1934, pp.5-19, p.6.
31 See Richard J Finlay 'National Identity in Crisis: Politicians, Intellectuals and the "End
of Scotland", 1920-1939' in Anthony Cooke (ed.) Modern Scottish History 1707 to the
Present (East Iinton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp.13-32.
32 Andrew Noble cites this statement by Muir in his introduction to Edwin Muir: Uncol
lected Scottish Criticism (London: Vision Press, 1982), (p.37).
33 'It is of living importance to Scotland that it should maintain and be able to assert its
identity; it cannot do so unless it feels itself a unity; and it cannot feel itself a unity on
a plane which has a right to human respect unless it can create an autonomous litera
ture. Otherwise it must remain in essence a barbarous country.' (SS, 182).
34 Muir states 'I think I am clear too on this further point; that Scottish literature as such
will disappear, and that London will become quite literally the capital of the British
Isles in a sense that it has never quite yet been; that, in other words, it will become our
national capital in just as real a sense as it is the capital of an ordinary English man to
day'. Quoted in the Introduction, (EMUSC, 36).
35 Quoted by Noble in the Introduction. (EMUSC, 100).
36 See Alan Massie's introduction to the reprinted Scott and Scotland, (p.xxiv).
154 Notes
37 Referring to Muir in The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn comments 'A markedly
oneiric element has crept into the argument somehow, and one wants to rub one's eyes.
Can anybody really think this? Not only somebody, but most literary nationalists: it
should not be imagined that this position represents a personal vagary of the author. It
does have a bizarre dream-logic to it. Muir himself took his pessimism so seriously
that not even nationalism seemed a solution to him. But broadly speaking the dream in
question is that of romantic nationalism, and the logic is as follows: modern Scottish
society does not fit it, and one has to explain why; since the idea-world (roots, organs,
and all) is all right, and has unchallengeable status, it has to be Scotland which is
wrong; therefore Scottish society and history are monstrously misshapen in some way,
blighted by Original Sin; therefore one should look further back for whatever led to the
frightful Enlightenment ("arid intellect", etc.) and the Industrial Revolution; the Ref
ormation is the obvious candidate, so before that things were pretty sound (a safe hy
pothesis, given the extent of knowledge about the 15th century in modern Scotland).'
(London: NLB, 1977), (p.122).
38 'On 26th August 1922 the first number of the Scottish Chapbook appeared, edited and
published by CM. Grieve from 16 Links Avenue, Montrose. The Chapbook was ad
vertised under the slogan, "Not Traditions - Precedents!"...' Duncan Glen, Hugh
MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance (Edinburgh and London: W. & R. Cham
bers Ltd., 1964), (p.74).
39 Commenting on the some of the underlying reasons for the emergence of the Modern
ist Renaissance, Duncan Glen writes: 'Many of the young Scottish writers who re
turned to Scotland after the 1914-1918 war filled with nationalistic feelings soon began
to see their country as culturally bankrupt and in grave danger of losing its national
identity in the larger political entity of Great Britain which is dominated by England.
They saw Scottish education as being almost wholly anglicised - Scottish history and
literature being neglected. They pointed to the lack of a Scottish national drama and of
a school of native composers and dismissed what was popularly regarded as distinc
tively Scottish literature as being quite unworthy of the genuine Scottish literary tradi
tion which had been weakened and corrupted by anglicisation. The remainder of Scot
tish writing they regarded as tributary to English literature and of little consequence to
the mainstream of the English tradition. Having rejected the contemporary concept of
Scottish culture, they looked for a revival of the Scottish traditions which had been
submerged by anglicisation. Indeed, inspired by CM. Grieve, or "Hugh MacDiarmid",
as he is perhaps better known, some of them came to believe that the only hope for a
distinctively Scottish literature was through a revival of the native languages of Scot
land - Scots and Gaelic; that the revival should not be built on Scotland's affinities
with England but on the differences between the two countries.' Introduction, (HMSR,
1).
Notes 155
40 'In his attempt to create a medium "capable of addressing the full range of literary
purpose" he drew on words from the various Scots dialects and further strengthened
the language by reviving words which had disappeared from modern speech - words
from the mediaeval poets - or as MacDiarmid said: "words and idioms from all the
dialects and all the periods". In addition he was also to use words or phrases from
other languages, including Gaelic... This language created by MacDiarmid became
known in the 'twenties as "synthetic Scots" and its creator used the term in the sense of
synthesising or "gathering together and reintegrating all the disjecta membra of the
Doric".' (HMSR, 33).
41 'If there is to be a Scottish literary revival the first essential is to get rid of our provin
ciality of outlook and to avail ourselves of Continental experience. The prevalent indif
ference in Scotland to foreign literature is itself one of the causes of the continued
domination and subversion of Scottish literature by English literature.' Quoted in
HMSR, (p.73).
42 Gray, 'A Modest Proposal for By-passing a Predicament', (p.9).
43 Ibid, (p.8).
44 Selected Poems, (pp. 31-32).
45 Ibid, (p.108).
46 Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn: or Scotland and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, 1927),
(p.36).
47 'At first blush there may seem little enough connection between such phenomena as
the Clyde Rebels, the Scottish Home Rule Movement, the "Irish Invasion" of Scotland,
and the campaign to resuscitate Braid Scots and Gaelic. But, adopting the Spenglerian
philosophy, the Renaissance movement regards itself as an effort in every aspect of the
national life to supplant the elements at present predominant by the other elements
they have suppressed, and thus reverse the existing order. Or, in terms of psychology,
the effort is to relieve the inhibitions imposed by English and Anglo-Scottish influ
ences and to inhibit in turn those factors of Scottish psychology which have rendered it
amenable to the post-Union state of affairs.' (A, 6-7).
48 An interesting parallel could be made here between the relative 'belatedness' of Scot
tish nationalism, as defined by Tom Nairn, and this absence of publishing houses and
capital in the North. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson attaches the defin
ing moment of the emergence of nationalism to the growth of print capitalism. Per
haps limited forms of print capitalism in Scotland, then, could be linked to the histori
cal absence of nationalism. In Albyn, MacDiarmid also comments on this belatedness:
'Scotland is unique among European nations in its failure to develop a nationalist sen
timent strong enough to be a vital factor in its affairs... The reason probably lies in the
fact that no comprehensive-enough agency has emerged; and the commonsense of our
people has rejected one-sided expedients incapable of addressing the organic complex
ity of our national life. For it must be recognised that the absence of nationalism is,
156 Notes
paradoxically, a form of Scottish self-determination. If that self-determination,
which... has reduced Scottish arts and affairs to a lamentable pass is to be induced to
take different forms and to express itself in a diametrically opposite direction to that
which it has taken for the past two hundred and twenty years, the persuading pro
gramme must embody considerations of superior power to those which have so long
ensured the opposite process.' (A, 48).
49 In Scott and Scotland Muir writes 'Scottish writers have certainly a strong sense of the
many-sided-ness of life, of the poetic side of the prosaic, and still more of the prosaic
side of the poetic, as is shown so clearly by Burns and Scott in their juxtapositions of
tragedy and comedy, of the lofty and the humorous. These juxtapositions are admira
ble, and they require a very fine balance of imagination. But Scottish fantastic poetry
seems to me not to touch the second room of life at all; it is a pure escape, a pure holi
day, whose ruling spirit is a Protestant Pope of Unreason...' (SS, 101). In Albyn,
MacDiarmid writes 'The effect of Burns' work on Scots poetry is well-known. It has
reduced it to a level beneath contempt. Little or no poetry that has been produced in
Scots since Burns' day has been of a quality to support comparison for a moment with
the average of contemporary poetry in any other European country. It is all of the
kailyard kind; sentimental, moralising, flatfooted, and with little or no relation to real
ity.' (A, 37).
50 Edward J. Cowan and Richard Finlay with William Paul, Scotland since 1688: Strug
gle for a Nation, (London: Cima Books, 2000), p.l 15.
51 Ibid,p.U6.
52 Catherine Carswell, Open the Door! (London: Virago, 1986), p.38.
53 Quoted in Alison Smith's 'And Woman Created Woman: Carswell, Shepherd and
Muir, and the Self-made Woman' in Christopher Whyte (ed.) Gendering the Nation:
Studies in Modern Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995),
pp.25-47,p.31.
54 Willa Muir, Imagined Selves (ed.) Kirsty Allen (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), p.64.
55 See Moira Burgess Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction (Glendaruel: Argyll Publish
ing, 1989), p. 133.
56 See Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poems, Alan Riach and Michael Grieve (eds), (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p.xviii.
57 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), (p.7).
58 (NN, 309). As will be discussed in the next chapter, Benedict Anderson's account of
the horizontal and vertical axes is slightly different. For Anderson, the horizontal
represents the way in which citizens are bound to the nation through the effects of
government and official national structures (he refers to the national census as an ex
ample of this). The vertical, on the other hand, refers to the ways in which citizens are
Notes 157
bound to the nation through, what he terms, their unboundness. This refers to the ways
in which they individually imagine themselves to be bound by it.
59 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contempo
rary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), (p.4).
60 Ibid,p.23
61 'The nomad enacts transitions without a teleological purpose; Deleuze also gives as an
example of this nomadic mode the figuration the "rhizome". The rhizome is a root that
grows underground, sideways; Deleuze plays it against the linear roots of trees. By ex
tension, it is "as i f the rhizomatic mode expressed a nonphallogocentric way of think
ing: secret, lateral, spreading, as opposed to the visible, vertical ramifications of West
ern ways of knowledge. By extension, the rhizome stands for a nomadic political on
tology that, not unlike Donna Haraway's "cyborg"... provides movable foundations
for a post-humanist view of subjectivity. Nomadic consciousness is a form of political
resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity.' Ibid, p.23.
62 'Nomadic cartographies need to be redrafted constantly; as such they are structurally
opposed to fixity and therefore to rapacious appropriation. The nomad has a sharpened
sense of territory but no possessiveness about it.' Ibid, p. 35-6.
63 John Osmond, The Divided Kingdom (London: Constable, 1988), (p.93).
64 Cairns Craig, 'Across the Divide' Radical Scotland, April/ May (1983), pp.24-25,
(P-24).
65 Christopher Whyte, 'Out of a Predicament', Radical Scotland October/ November
(1983), pp.20-21, (p.20). In this article Whyte stresses the need for more expansive ac
counts of national culture. He writes: 'Therefore the new Scottish identity or aware
ness which eventually arises will bear little resemblance to what we now understand as
"Scottish". Just now Scotland is a bundle of fragments, of contradictions and antago
nisms which, if allowed to find expression, will add up to an identity much richer and
more tolerant than anything we could invent: Highland and Lowland, Gaelic and Eng
lish-speaking, a Scots-speaking working class and a highly Anglicised middle class,
Catholic and Protestant, European and Asiatic, Irish and Scottish and English, and two
cities so geographically close yet different in character as Glasgow and Edinburgh...
...since over half the population are women, and there are some sensitive, feminist
men around, the hard man can no longer be taken as representative of Scotland. A new
Scottish identity won't exclude the experience of women, of gays, of children, or our
fundamental awareness of pervasive urban misery, of what oppression and defeat are
like.' (p.21).
66 'Across the Divide', (p.25).
67 'An Open Letter ', (p.4).
68 For a discussion of cultural inferiorism see The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (Edinburgh:
Polygon, 1989) by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull. This will also be discussed
in more detail in Chapter Two.
158 Notes
69 'An Open Letter', (p.4).
70 David Black, 'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer', Chapman 35/36 (1983), pp.32-
34, (p.32).
71 Ibid, (p.32).
72 In Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds) The Scottish Novel since the Seventies
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp.217-231, (p.217).
73 Lorn Maclntyre 'Confessions of a Justified High Flyer' Glasgow Herald 5 February
1994, (p.ll).
74 'The Predicament', (p.34).
75 Alasdair Gray, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland: Independence (Edinburgh: Canon-
gate, 1992).
76 Douglas Gifford 'At Last - The Real Scottish Literary Renaissance?' Books in Scot
land no.34 (1990), pp.1-4, (p.l).
77 Ibid, (p.l).
78 Gifford writes: 'So what's new about our present revival? Is it in its turn going to be
seen as energetic, interesting, but short-lived, and unrepresentative of a "whole" Scot
land?' (p.l).
79 'John Byrne is the type of this new, stylish, confident Scottishness; moving through
parody of American and Scottish lifestyles, his protagonists are closer to America,
Hollywood and the rock and roll era than to either a Scottish traditional past or an Eng
lish tradition - and his Scottishness sees no boundaries to its communication', (p.4).
Throughout this article Gifford tends to ironically suggest the need for a Scotland
'without boundaries', while simultaneously hoping to reassert them.
80 Ibid, (pA).
81 Ibid, (p.4).
82 For a further discussion of how Scottishness is formed through Englishness see Cairns
Craig's Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (Edin
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).
83 'One might say that a process of "canon-formation", guided but not dictated by con
sumer forces, in ways that have not been seen before, has come into being over the last
fifteen years or so. I use "canon" here specifically as a piece of shorthand for what has
been termed "the glacially changing core" of consensus about certain novels that is
surrounded by "the rapidly changing periphery" of debate about others.' See Richard
Todd Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London:
Bloomsbury, 1996), (p.3).
84 In Politics and Society in Scotland (London: Macmillan, 1996), Alice Brown, David
McCrone and Lindsay Paterson comment on this postmodern fragmentation of national
identity. They suggest: 'National identities become more problematic as conventional
state identities are corroded by the forces of globalisation which shift the classical so
ciological focus away from the assumption that 'societies' are well-bounded social,
Notes 159
economic and cultural systems. What replaces conventional state identities is not "cul
tural homogenisation" in which everyone shares in the same global post-modern iden
tity because they consume the same identity and cultural products; rather, in [Stuart]
Hall's words, "We are confronted by a range of different identities, each appealing to
us, or rather to different parts of ourselves, from which it seems possible to choose.'"
(P-193).
85 Brown, McCrone and Paterson suggest that whereas in the past 'There was little need
to ask who we were, because the social structures we lived in allowed us to read off
our identities in an unproblematic way,' in more recent times the concept of identity
has largely 'come apart' where these previous 'certainties' have now been dissolved.
Politics and Society in Scotland, (p.191). This loss of certainty has therefore been cen
tral to contemporary constructions of Scottishness.
86 Brown, McCrone and Paterson also refer to this increasing fluidity and contingency of
national identity with respect to growing interrelationships between Scotland, Britain
and Europe. See Politics and Society in Scotland, (p.210).
87 Francis Russell Hart, The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey, (London: John Murray,
1978), (p.l).
88 For a discussion of mythology in contemporary Scottish fiction see Douglas Gifford's
'Imagining Scotlands: The Return to Mythology in Modern Scottish Fiction' in Su-
sanne Hagemann (ed.) Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, pp.17-49. Gif
ford writes 'In a sense, contemporary Scottish writing is deciding that, if the ancient
traditions and hidden powers of Scotland are dead, then it's necessary to reinvent
them. The implications for Scottish social, cultural, and political futures are incalcula
ble, but profound.' (p.49).
89 'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer', Chapman 35/36 (1983), pp.68-71, (p.70).
90 For a discussion of Calvinism see Cairns Craig The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative
and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
91 Cairns Craig, 'The Fratricidal Twins: Scottish Literature, Scottish History and the
Construction of Scottish Culture' in Douglas Gifford and Edward J. Cowan (eds) The
Polar Twins (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1999), pp.19-38, (p.22).
92 In 'A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Postcolonial Condition',
Berthold Schoene also suggests that the movement from one literary period to another
does not necessarily imply an abandonment of history: 'The writers of the Scottish Lit
erary Renaissance, however, did not invent Scottish identity from scratch. Rather than
creating new stories, they remoulded popular mythic self-images from the past with
which their Scottish readership was already familiar and thus found it easy to identify.
Inevitably, this went hand in hand with a resuscitation and perpetuation of national
stereotypes, cliches and prejudices. Accordingly, many literary works of the Scottish
Renaissance are as sentimentalising and idealistic in tone, rhetoric and atmosphere as
those of the kailyard tradition.' Scotlands, 2:1 (1995), (p.l 13).
160 Notes
93 'The Fratricidal Twins', (p.27)
Chapter 2
94 James G. Kellas, Modern Scotland: The Nation since 1870 (London: Pall Mall Press,
1968), p.3.
95 See, for example, Andrew Marr The Day Britain Died, (London: Profile Books, 2000).
96 Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
p.5.
97 E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality
(Cambridge: Canto, 1997), (p. 191).
98 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), (p.3).
99 See David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation
(London: Routledge, 1996). 'Because Scotland is a nation which is not a state, conven
tional sociological models - premised on the fusion of nation and state - are of limited
utility. Nevertheless, as the nation-state loses its raison d'etre in a world economy, pol
ity and culture, so Scotland seems to provide a glimpse into the future rather than the
past. Given that it is locked firmly into an ever-expanding world economy, the asser
tion of national identity and cultural distinctiveness comes at a most interesting point
in history. As such, Scotland stands at the centre of sociological concerns in this
(post)modern world.' (p.33).
100 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: NLB,
1977), (p.359). 101
Joyce McMillan, 'Scotland's Shame', Guardian, 10 August 1999, (p.15).
102 In Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1999), Murray Pittock adopts this approach to national identity. Commenting on the
limitations of Anderson's notion of the 'imagined community', Pittock writes: 'Socio
logical approaches to nationalism often display severe limitations in the blithe simplic
ity with which they theorise the depth and variety of the history which generates and
absorbs us all: many of the theorists of nationalism do not seem to care overmuch for
historical detail or counterfactual evidence. For this reason... the more flexible ideas
of writers such as Anthony Smith, who stress continuity and ancestry more than "in
vention" or "imagination", are to be preferred.' (p. 129).
103 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), (p.59).
104 Anderson begins The Spectre of Comparisons by stating 'The purposes of this essay
are essentially three. The first, and most important, is to reframe the problem of the
formation of collective subjectivities in the modern world by consideration of the ma
terial, institutional, and discursive bases that necessarily generate two profoundly con
trasting types of seriality, which I will call unbound and bound. Unbound seriality,
Notes 161
which has its origins in the print market, especially in newspapers, and in the represen
tations of popular performance, is exemplified by such open-to-the-world plurals as
nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats, and workers. It is, for example, the seriality that
makes the United Nations a normal, wholly unparadoxical institution. Bound seriality,
which has its origins in governmentality, especially in such institutions as the census
and the elections, is exemplified by finite series like Asian- Americans, beurs, and
Tutsis. It is the seriality that makes a United Ethnicities or a United Identities unthink
able.'(SoC, 29).
105 See, for example, David McCrone, Angela Morris and Richard Kiely's Scotland - The
Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1995).
106 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Oxford: Polity Press,
1998), (p.56).
107 Critics such as Fredric Jameson have welcomed an interrogation of the effects of glob-
alism. Although sceptical of broad postmodernising tendencies, Jameson has called for
a need to assess the changes now taking place. See New Left Review no. 4 July/ August
(2000), pp.49-69. Jameson focuses here on the need for collective resistance to global-
ism, examining what he regards as its central components: the technological, political,
cultural, economic and social. 108
'I am aware that this assertion of Scottish belatedness also begs many questions. There
is much to say about the precursors of nationalism in the 19th century, like the roman
tic movement of the 1850s and the successive Home Rule movements between 1880
and 1914... But all that need be said here is that they were quite distinctly precursors,
not the thing itself, remarkable in any wider perspective for their feebleness and politi
cal ambiguity rather than their prophetic power. While in the 1920s we see by contrast
the emergence of a permanent political movement with the formation of the National
Party of Scotland (direct ancestor of the SNP) in 1928. And, just as important, the ap
pearance of the epic poem of modern Scottish nationalism... MacDiarmid's A Drunk
Man Looks at the Thistle, in 1926.' (TBU, 95).
109 'This is a structural fact about it. And it is a fact to which there are no exceptions: in
this sense, it is an exact (not a rhetorical) statement about nationalism to say that it is
by nature ambivalent.' (TBU, 348).
110 In his earlier article, 'The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism' Nairn writes that
'The romantic consciousness... could only be an absolute dream to the Scots. Unable
to function as ideology, as a moving spirit of history, it too was bound to become a
possessing demon. Elsewhere, the revelation of the romantic past and the soul of the
people informed some real future - in the Scottish limbo, they were the nation's real
ity. Romanticism provided - as the Enlightenment could not, for all its brilliance - a
surrogate identity... Perhaps this function as substitute consciousness has something to
do with the peculiar intensity of Romanticism in Scotland, and with the great signifi-
162 Notes
cance of the country as a locale of the European romantic fallacy. It had the right sort
of unreality. Such unreality - in effect, the substitution of nostalgia for real experience
- has remained at the centre of the characteristically Scottish structure of feeling.' Re
printed in Karl Miller's Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (London: Faber and Faber,
1970), pp.34-54, (p.39).
111 Nairn continues: 'It is the devastating rapidity and scale of the impact of these new
conditions that has made Scotland into the exemplar of "neo-nationalism" in this
sense. One need only compare the oil industry's arrival to the previous, gradual (and
more generally characteristic) infiltration of international corporations into the indus
trial belt during the 1950s, and 60s, to grasp this.' (TBU, 128).
112 In 'The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism', Nairn is even more cynical of the
Scottish 'cultural predicament': 'Sporranry, alcoholism, and the ludicrous appropria
tion of the remains of Scotland's Celtic fringe as a national symbol, have been cele
brated in a million emetic ballads. It is an image further blackened by a sickening mili
tarism, the relic of Scotland's special role in the building up of British imperialism.
Yet any judgement on this aspect of Scottish national consciousness ought to be sof
tened by the recognition that these are the pathetic symbols of an inarticulate people
unable to forge valid correlates of their different experience: the peculiar crudity of tar
tanry only corresponds to the peculiarly intense alienation of the Scots on this level.'
(p.41).
113 Ibid, (p.52).
114 'Misplaced, sentimental, archaic, it is nonetheless a dream of wholeness - a wholeness
which will express life instead of hiding it, which will free the national tongue and will
from their secular inhibitions, a realness to startle itself and the watching world. It is a
dream of release and affirmation, shared by many; and as such, more important than
most of what passes for reality.' Ibid, (p.53).
115 'The contradictions and possibihties of neo-nationalism require far more study. The
phenomenon is much too new to allow ready predictions as to its future course. All one
can be reasonably sure of is that it will embody contradictions analogous to those of
ancestral nationalism: on the one hand, the perspective of liberation to a more genuine
democracy or self-rule, accompanied by emergence from debilitating provinciality and
cultural estrangement; on the other hand, the tendency of the very same movement (a
tendency inherent in it) towards national narrowness, subjective illusion and conceit,
political and economic regression, and romantic nonsense. At different times or in dif
ferent conditions, one side or the other may appear more prominent, or in control. But
in reality both belong inextricably to the historical structure of nationalism as a mode
of development - and presumably to that of neo-nationalism also. Given that the latter
belongs to a new phase of development — to a far more advanced stage of capitalism
and bourgeois society - it is still to be seen how the objective circumstances of these
times will make its contradictions display themselves.' (TBU, 181).
Notes 163
116 Nations and Nationalism, (p. 192).
117 'Nationalism as a mode of political development may indeed have advanced enough
for its nature to be approximately visible. It does not follow that it's on the way out.
Doubt on this score must be reinforced by the fact that metropolitan pundits have been
wishing it away (or imagining the worst was over) for most of the time since 1780. But
the tree has grown in spite of them. Minerva's owl should be left sleeping in its
branches for a while longer yet - at least until the last great empire has been Balkan-
ized, and a new constitution for Europe been worked out.' (FoN, 48).
118 See Robert Crawford Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press 1992 rp 2000), p.329.
119 In Out of History Caims Craig also questions Nairn's use of metaphor. For Craig, the
adoption of such tropes only perpetuates the notion of a Scottish void, which has en
sured that Scotland remains 'out of history'. This will be discussed in more detail later.
120 Nairn suggests that Third Way politics are like chloroform, a means of anaesthetizing
(AB, 66). On Tony Blair, he writes 'If Tony Blair so much as winks at a journalist in
the course of some perfectly anodyne remark about the constitution or the monarchy, it
is sure to be read the next day as a sure indicator of abiding radicalism.' (AB, 173).
121 Commenting on Nairn's confusing rhetoric and this simplification of history, Francis
Mulhern writes: 'His language deserves a little attention, in something of its own high-
troping spirit. Imagine that a twister makes its way across Nairn's textual landscape,
sucking up everything in its path. Then, quite simply, the storm abates and releases its
cargo, which makes a single, very strange heap. It includes a house, a computer and a
wooden spoon; the Titanic, with iceberg; a leopard (Sicilian)and an elephant; a rotting
fish, a polyhedron, and assorted insects, including a butterfly that officers a ship; and
on top of all this, a tub of pot-noodle. No, not Kansas: Britain. And the chief oddity in
this figural jumble is that it suggests diversity in an analysis that is, in contrast, essen
tially simple. This archaeology-cum-zoology of Ukanian modernity somehow com
pensates for the fact that Nairn's literal sweep of the landscape discovers only one sig
nificant life-form and one technology: the post-1688 ruling bloc and its prosthesis, the
Westminster state.' 'Britain after Nairn' New Left Review, No.5 Sep/Oct 2000, (pp.55-
56).
122 He continues: 'I know talk of this kind is liable to evoke Freud, or even Jung and W.B.
Yeats: the mythology of a national unconscious. But actually no great excursions into
that cloudy realm are required: we have all endured this familiar all our lives and know
him only too well. He is none other than the Scots' most famous and unshakeable
drinking companion: "lack of self-confidence".' (AB, 101). This provides another ex
ample of Nairn's urge to challenge national essentialism while simultaneously uphold
ing it in order to 'justify' his own argument. This stereotypical formulation is perhaps
not too dissimilar to that of the 'average Scot' described by Bold in Chapter 1.
123 John Gray, 'Little Scotlander', New Statesman, January 24 2000, (p.54).
164 Notes
124 'If the idea of sovereign statehood that Nairn invokes belongs in the past, his view of
society is sadly monocultural. Aside from a rather formulaic mention of the Stephen
Lawrence case, there is no reference in After Britain to the UK's Asian or black com
munities. The England it suggests is an ironic take on that of Ealing Studios. The Eng
land that actually exists is passed over as if it does not matter. But to project the break
up of Britain without considering how it harbours Europe's most multicultural society
is to blot out one of its most attractive features... It is true that many people have a
waning sense of being British. Even so, there are millions of people in Britain today
who are unwilling to think of themselves as being, solely or even mainly, English,
Welsh, Irish or Scottish. Nairn considers the idea that states can shelter multiple identi
ties only to reject it. Yet for many people, being British has appeal precisely because it
is not a blood-and-soil identity that excludes all others. Nairn is right to remind us that
Britain originated in a unitary state that has passed away, but he seems scarcely to have
noticed the country that Britain has become.' 'Little Scotlander', (p.54).
125 'Absence of self-confidence is the only natural condition of a social formation whose
collective or historical "self' has been partly lobotomized and partly placed in cold
storage. That is, the inveterate state of a nation never destroyed but permitted half-life
within relatively unalterable parameters - low-pressure or "low-political" autonomy
founded on good behaviour at home, around the hearth, and then amply rewarded by
the external (imperial) life-support system, the sustaining outward habitus of British-
ness.' (AB, 101).
126 'Different generations have manifested this inherited dilemma and its famously "spht
personality" in many different ways... I can't resist singling out one consistent and
fairly central current within the stream, which has been less noticed: shame... Shame
is by its nature drawn to concealment and circuitous or reluctant expression. It tends to
be betrayed rather than voiced or honestly commented upon... It is part of the explana
tion of why the Scots have often understood themselves so badly - and at the same
time made it difficult for outsiders to understand them. Some things just can't be toler
ated, and so have to be pretended away, grinningly made light of or kept out of view.'
(AB, 102).
127 Once again, throughout this book Nairn continues with his usage of gendered meta
phors (castration and impotence) and the concepts of 'national nihilism' and paralysis
as a means of defining the modem Scottish political condition.
128 'The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism', (p.54).
129 'In my personal case this outward-bound neurosis led to frankly nihilistic excesses
about strangling Kirk Ministers and mowing down be-kilted landowners with a Marx
ist machine-gun. The point is that such attitudes were just part of that structural dislo
cation of identity I have been referring to. They were the obverse of douce conformism
and being the good boys of Britishness'. (AS, 104).
Notes 165
130 'Certainly nothing in Nairn's account, in which everything has the value of a tartan
knick-knack, would allow us to describe it as nationalist in any accepted sense of the
word. It is sometimes closer to the ravings of a Trevor-Roper than to what might be
expected in literature of a nationalist bent. Nairn is openly contemptuous of cultural
nationalist claims, referring, for instance, to "nationalist paranoia about assimilation"
to England... Here is a writer, one is almost tempted to say, whose profoundest re
flexes are anti-nationalist rather than nationalist.' (ESC, 59).
131 'Though not always in so cmde a form, projections of this kind are to be traced in
much of the scholarship associated with different aspects of Scottish history. They do
not suddenly appear in a fully refined form at a particular historical juncture, expressed
by a particular writer or group of thinkers. The matter is much more subtle, and much
more insidious.' (ESC, 16-17).
132 'The debate over the similarities and differences between Scotland and England with
regard to patterns of social change is in many ways a proxy for a deeper debate about
whether or not Scotland exists; if it is similar to the rest of Britain in certain crucial re
spects, then it does not. The argument here, however, is that it is not necessary for
Scotland to be "different" in terms of its social structures to be a proper object of so
ciological study. We do not negate its existence by pointing out that it has far more
similarities with other advanced industrial countries (including England) than differ
ences.' (US, 86).
133 Referring to the charge that their accounts of the Scottish tradition were based upon
conflict-free notions of cultural homogeneity and essentialism, Beveridge and Turnbull
write, 'Certainly they are not views we happen to hold, or have ever tried to articulate
or defend.'(SAE, 166).
134 'The project involves the recovery and reconstruction of certain specific, pre-
Enlightenment traditions of ethical enquiry which in modem liberal societies have
been marginalized or lost. The argument of After Virtue was that classical, and in par
ticular Aristotelian ethical theory displays a richness and coherence which our current
views lack, while the more recent writing draws attention to the resources of Augustin-
ian and Thomist theory... It is through a re-engagement with these and other pre-
modern traditions of ethical, social and political thought, Maclntyre's work proposes,
that we can now best confront the emptiness of liberalism and the exhaustion of mod
em sources of critique.' (SAE, 134).
135 David McCrone, 'Post-nationalism and the Decline of the Nation-state', Radical Scot
land, No.49, Feb/Mar 1991, pp.6-8, (p.8).
136 'New state formations will emerge, some seeming to correspond to old-style nation-
states, but without the doctrine of absolute sovereignty. State boundaries will become
more malleable and changeable. We might ask - if the nation-state is dying, is not na
tionalism as an ideology dead? Not in its newer forms, because the challenges to more
recent and more distant sources of power are likely to grow. Post-nationalism will seek
166 Notes
to mobilize new sentiments of resistance and cultural development based on the chal
lenges of the 21st century.' 'Post-nationalism and the Decline of the Nation-state',
(P-8).
137 He writes: 'If the modernity thesis had stressed scientific rationaUty, post-modernity
emphasized the erratic and unpredictable nature of much social behaviour. Modernity
had associated itself with industrialism and organized capitalism; post-modernity fo
cused on consumerism and "disorganized" capitalism. Modernity had aligned the na
tional economy, polity and culture in such a way that citizenship and an allegiance to
the sovereign state provided a clear and unambiguous identity. Post-modernity, on the
other hand, pointed to the limited nature of state sovereignty in an interdependent
world, and highlighted the often contradictory and competing identities on offer.' (US,
9).
138 Referring to the historian G.S. Pryde they write: 'Pryde's comparatively early work
demonstrates an openness to the totality of modem Scottish experience which the gen
eral historians of the succeeding twenty-five years were seldom to emulate.' (SAE, 32).
139 'What is on offer in the late twentieth century is what we might call "pick 'n mix"
identity, in which we wear our identities lightly, and change them according to circum
stances. Those who would argue for the paramountcy or even the exclusivity of a sin
gle identity would have a hard time of it in the late twentieth century. The question to
ask is no how best do cultural forms reflect an essential national identity, but how do
cultural forms actually help to construct and shape identity, or rather, identities - for
there is less need to reconcile and prioritize these. Hence, national identity does not
take precedence over class or gender identities (or indeed, vice versa) except insofar as
these are subjectively ordered. These identities themselves, in rum, cannot be defined
except with reference to the cultural forms which give them shape and meaning.' (US,
195).
140 In The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey, Francis Russell Hart questions this conven
ience of placing literature into a 'coherent' tradition, suggesting 'There are reasonable
uncertainties as to whether the novel has a distinctive Scottish tradition'. Yet Hart does
not want to dismiss the importance of tradition either, merely to examine its frame
work. He goes on to say, 'But surely we can postulate that the novel as a form of his
torical and cultural representation must be significantly influenced or conditioned by
the history and culture from which its practitioners come or within which they work'
(TSN, viii). Hart is reluctant to generalise about an overall tradition, yet also wants to
point out that 'The Scottish novel suffers from a passive conspiracy of neglect'. Con
sequently, it is the underlying tensions between these two positions that will be exam
ined here.
141 'It is not that Scottish culture is a vacuum in this period: it is that Scottish culture has
been retrospectively "evacuated" by its historians: first, they attach whatever it pro
duced to a conception of English culture, ignoring the fact that their very presence un-
Notes 167
dermines the idea of an "English" culture in the period, and then they ignore what was
actually happening in Scotland because it does not fit in with the model of culture
which they have based on the English example.' (OOH, 98).
142 For a discussion of the invention of tartanry see Hugh Trevor-Roper 'The Invention of
Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland', in The Invention of Tradition ed. by
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
pp.15-41.
143 'It is precisely the condition of modernity to inhabit a cosmopolitan city, with an inter
national architecture, and to have a hinterland whose traditional lifestyle is artificially
maintained (either by subsidy to the economic structure or by turning it into theatre) as
a symbol of the difference which we know exists between our different cultures but
which, in the conditions of modernity, are less and less visible... In the world of or
ganized social symbols that is the modem condition, to articulate difference cannot be
anything but a conscious construction that has to be based on something which is part
of a culture's common memory. That memory can be recalled, re-awakened, re
invented even, but to do so is not simply to create new ideas out of the heads of intel
lectuals: those new images and symbols have to become part of the common percep
tion of the culture. To remake existing cultural perceptions is no easy business: you
may not like the existing construction; you may wish to replace it with something else;
but to negate it, to deny it, to refuse to be associated with it denies the very past which
represents, at least in part, the commonality of which you are an inheritor, linking you
to the rest of your community, and justifying the need for a cultural identity at all.'
(<%>#, 111-112).
144 Craig quotes from 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' where Eliot discusses the
importance of continuity in tradition, where the poet is able to feel 'that the whole of
the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order'. A 'disso
ciation of sensibility' occurs when this continuity is broken. (OOH, 173).
145 'The traditions of a culture survive in many ways: the centre of gravity shifts from
religion to philosophy to literature to the visual arts and in each of these offer different
resources through which the culture can find the means for the continued assertion of
its traditions and of the values which they embody.' (TMSN, 28).
146 'This then is an attempt to define some of the key elements which constitute a specifi
cally Scottish tradition of the novel and some of the ways in which that tradition has
imagined the nation which it addresses. It is written in the context of Scotland's newly
regained political status and has been shaped by the explosion of creativity that has
characterized Scottish culture since the 1970s - an explosion in part stimulated by the
political idealisms, both socialist and nationalist, which have resisted the incorporation
of Scotland into the prevailing orthodoxies of British politics since the late 1960s. In
terms of the novel, no period in Scottish culture has, perhaps, been as rich as the period
168 Notes
between the 1960s and 1990s: precisely because of its richness, and because so many
of its major writers have been accepted as the voices of an "international culture" the
argument of this book is designed to establish some of the underlying continuities -
both in terms of the issues of Scottish society and in terms of the formal development
of the novel.' (TMSN, 36).
147 'The House with the Green Shutters constmcts for us the model of a society in which
the creative imagination and the community which it has to express are utterly sun
dered from one another: this is why fear has become an immovable obstacle, locking
the society into an eternal moral stasis, no matter what changes are thrust upon it from
without. In one sense, one might say, these novels represent the true condition of Scot
tish society, since its creativity - like much of its power - was being drawn off to Lon
don and incorporated into English values; but the novels do not present that situation -
they present a situation in which no one within their Scottish communities has the ca
pacity for insight which the novel itself claims, and in which, therefore, the Scottish
community's ability to escape the dialectic of fearful and fearless is the inevitable out
come of its own innate characteristics. It is not, for Douglas Brown, that the imagina
tion has been repressed or exiled from Scottish society, but that the Scottish imagina
tion is - by virtue of Scottishness - incapable of reaching those qualities which are ful
filled in English culture. The dead-end conflict of the fearful and the fearless, tied to
gether in communal terror and individual aggrandizement, is thus presented as the in
evitable outcome of Scottish society's own innate characteristics rather than a function
of the dialectic between Scottish values and English values.' (TMSN, 63-64).
148 Mike Featherstone 'Global and Local Cultures' in Mapping the Futures: Local Cul
tures, Global Change ed. by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson
and Lisa Tickner (London: Routledge, 1993), (p. 173).
149 See also Featherstone's Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991).
150 Mapping the Futures, (p. 169).
151 Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, (p. 129).
152 Robert Young White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990), (p. 12).
153 Here Young mentions Edward Said's Orientalism which draws attention to the elitism
and underlying 'white mythologies' of universalist accounts of history, and to Hegel's
The Philosophy of History where he states that 'Africa has no history' as examples of
the need to revise historicism from postmodern perspectives.
154 Ibid, (p.15).
155 Ibid, (p.\9).
Chapter 3
156 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans, by Leon S. Roudiez (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991), (p.l).
Notes 169
157 Geoffrey Gait Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (London
and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), (p.5).
158 Towards the end of 'Open Letter to Harlem Desir', Kristeva writes 'Finally... I should
like to suggest that the following statement be engraved on the walls of all schools and
political institutions; commented and elaborated upon, it could become a touchstone
for anyone wishing to participate in the French nation understood as an esprit general
- a set of private freedoms liable to be included in larger sets: "If I knew something
useful to myself and detrimental to my family, I would reject it from my mind. If I
knew something useful to my family, but not to my homeland and detrimental to
Europe, or else useful to Europe and detrimental to mankind, I would consider it a
crime." ... The identities and the "common denominators" are acknowledged here, but
one avoids their morbid contortion by placing them, not erasing them, in a polyphonic
community that is today called France. Tomorrow, perhaps, if the esprit general wins
over the Volksgeist, such a polyphonic community could be named Europe.' Nations
without Nationalism, 63.
159 See Geoffrey Gait Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Lon
don and Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), (p.5).
160 'Exactly when the transformation to Enghshness took place is quite a long story. But
one can see a certain point at which the particular forms of English identity feel they
can command, within their own discourses, the discourses of almost everybody else:
not quite everybody, but almost everyone else at a certain moment in history.' Stuart
Hall 'The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity' in McClintock et al.
Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), (p. 174).
161 'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer', (p.69).
162 Ibid, (p.70).
163 Ibid, (p.70).
164 In Glasgow Urban Writing and Postmodernism, Beat Witschi writes that 'Gray suc
cessfully combines the "local" with the "international"; that is the understanding of a
Scottish (or Glaswegian) identity recognisable in Gray's writing is broadened - by
means of various literary strategies... into a literary vision of Glasgow and beyond, a
vision which can therefore be appreciated by Scots and non-Scots alike.' (p.7).
165 Mike Featherstone, 'Global and Local Cultures', in Mapping the Futures: Local Cul
tures, Global Change ed. by Jon Bird and others (London: Routledge, 1993), (p.171).
166 Ibid,(p.\l\).
167 In Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 Richard Dellamora (ed.) writes: 'Postmodern
Apocalypse. The phrase sounds apt, but do these two terms belong together? Consider,
for instance, the word 'modem' within the context of aesthetic discourse. If "modem"
refers to avant-garde aesthetics, which insists on "making it new," then to be post - or
170 Notes
beyond the modem is to beyond those qualitative breaks in the temporal and the spatial
order that characterise apocalypse as a genre. If, in contrast, "modem" refers, as is
usually the case today within anglophone literary studies, to the aesthetic closure
within which the literary experimentation of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Vir
ginia Woolf is judged to be contained, then to be post- means to be beyond closure in
the field of newly opened textual possibilities. As a number of theorists have argued,
the negative prospect of this infinite horizon is that it can imply mere repetition, a
ceaseless doing again of deeds that issue in frustration and failure... This last possibil
ity helps explain a pervasive sense of unease in contemporary existence. The attendant
lack of confidence in the possibility of shaping history in accordance with human de-
sire(s) provides the bass line of culture - political, economic, and aesthetic - in the fin
de millennium.' (p.xi). This sense of the postmodern condition may also be linked to
Walter Benjamin's 'Angel of History' in which the present is irredeemably separated
from the notion of progress: 'His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a
chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise;
it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close
them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call pro
gress.' Illuminations, (pp.257-258).
168 Caims Craig, The History of Scottish Literature Volume Four: The Twentieth Century,
(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), (p.2).
169 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1999), (p.32).
170 'The consumer turnover time of certain images can be very short indeed (close to that
ideal of the "twinkling of an eye" that Marx saw as optimal from the standpoint of
capital circulation). Many images can also be mass-marketed instantaneously over
space. Given the pressures to accelerate turnover time (and to overcome spatial barri
ers), the commodification of images of the most ephemeral sort would seem to be a
godsend from the standpoint of capital accumulation, particularly when other paths to
relieve overaccumulation seem blocked. Ephemerality and instantaneous communica-
bility over space then become virtues to be explored and appopriated by capitalists for
their own purposes... Corporations, governments, political and intellectual leaders, all
value a stable (though dynamic) image as part of their aura of authority and power.
The mediatization of politics has now become all pervasive. This becomes, in effect,
the fleeting, superficial, and illusory means whereby an individualistic society of tran
sients sets forth its nostalgia for common values. The production and marketing of
such images of permanence and power require considerable sophistication, because the
continuity and stability of the image have to be retained while stressing the adaptabil-
Notes 111
ity, flexibility, and dynamism of whoever or whatever is being imaged.' The Condition
of Postmodernity (p.288).
171 Edwin Morgan, 'Gray and Glasgow' in Crawford and Nairn (eds), pp.64-76, (p.71).
172 Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism, (London, Arnold,
1992), (p.l 1).
173 Ibid, (p.U).
11A 'As Kermode saw in his book The Sense of an Ending (1966), people with no clear
sense of their ending will always fabricate one... Postmodernism is itself, in this re
spect, another Grand Narrative, but one about the End of Grand Narratives. It is im
possibly tied up with performative contradictions. It may even be the case that in a
world offering increasingly less space for speculative idealism, the impetus for post-
modem thought comes from the diminishing speculators themselves, intellectual theo
rists anxious to construct a version of world history which can preserve some signifi
cant place for themselves as prophets of its doom.' Ibid, (p. 12).
175 'For the "reality" of the nuclear age and the fable of nuclear war are perhaps distinct,
but they are not two separate things. It is the war (in other words the fable) that triggers
the fabulous war effort, this senseless capitalisation of sophisticated weaponry, this
speed race in search of speed, this crazy precipitation which, through techno-science,
through all the techno-scientific inventiveness that it motivates, structures not only the
army, diplomacy, politics, but the whole of the human socius today, everything that is
named by the old words culture, civilisation... "Reality", let's say the encompassing
institution of the nuclear age, is constructed by the fable, on the basis of an event that
has never happened (except in fantasy, and that is nothing at all), an event of which
one can only speak, an event whose advent remains an invention by men (the sense of
the word "invention") or which, rather, remains to be invented. An invention because it
depends upon new technical mechanisms, to be sure, but an invention also because it
does not exist and especially because, at whatever point it should come into existence,
it would be a grand premiere appearance.' 'No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed
ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)', Diacritics, 14.2 (1984), pp.20-33, (p.24).
176 In The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), Tobin
Siebers critiques Derrida's approach to 'nuclear criticism', suggesting that his ap
proach tends to equate deconstruction with the 'reality' of the nuclear age. 'Derrida's
purpose... is not to prove the competence or incompetence of the humanities to solve
nuclear problems but to write a piece of nuclear criticism. In this respect, his essay is
too deconstructive to succeed, if nuclear criticism designates a new approach to the
problem. Derrida's description of nuclear war as fabulously textual and massively real
at the same time exposes the extent to which his version of nuclear criticism relies on
the same laws and ethical presuppositions as deconstruction.' (p.24).
177 'Lanark should end on a down note, with the hero's death, and yet one finishes with a
feeling of only half-undertaken a process of instruction and digestion, surfeited on the
172 Notes
richness of the book, and ready to plunge back into it again. When Lanark, on the Ne
cropolis, sees the floods recede and the light break over the city, there is an image of
rebirth.' Christopher Harvie 'Alasdair Gray and the Condition of Scotland Question' in
Crawford & Nairn (eds), pp.76-89, (p.83).
178 Alison Lumsden, 'Innovation and Reaction in the Fiction of Alasdair Gray' in Wallace
and Stevenson (eds), pp.115-127.
179 As Randall Stevenson points out in his article 'Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern',
there is the danger that postmodern literary techniques have become domesticated. He
writes: 'Increasingly, postmodernism may be seen not just as a symptom, but even as a
contributory cause of social malaise. It may once have been a site of radical challenge
to conventional forms and structures, or of subversive questioning of the means
through which reality can be conveniently moulded, mediated and made consumable.
What was once challenging, however, has grown increasingly familiar, even chic; in
stitutionalised into fashions and styles which can be used to assist rather than subvert
the processes of a consumer society... Postmodernism may simply have been domesti
cated, tamed into feeding the "creature" it once seemed equipped to threaten and con
demn.' In Wallace & Stevenson (eds), pp.48-63, (p.60).
180 Despite his comments on potential 'domestication', Randall Stevenson also agrees that
postmodern techniques in Lanark should not be underestimated. 'Yet if Gray's post
modernism cannot be entirely defended, nor should it be wholly condemned. Postmod
ernism may have lost its inherent radicalism, but there are still radical ends it can be
used to achieve. Gray's insistence on his work as a constructed artefact, for example, is
in certain ways as much an act of responsibility as of indulgence. Lanark, in particular,
illustrates the paradox that the most transparently, ostentatiously artificial texts may be
the ones most likely to redirect their readers' attention upon reality: as Berthold Brecht
showed, an undermining of seductive, secure containment within illusion encourages
spectators to take responsibility for reshaping the world beyond the stage. In one way,
Lanark does have something to offer in terms of seductive illusion: if Glasgow is "the
sort of industrial city where most people live nowadays but nobody imagines living"
(L, 105), the novel helps redress this poverty of imagination through the diverse inven
tiveness of its means of envisaging the city. Yet neither readers nor characters can long
be securely contained in worlds so clearly shown to be the results of Nastier's conjur
ing tricks. The real achievement of Lanark is not in seducing readers with illusion, but
in allowing them to escape from it; in forcing them to consider conjuring and to exam
ine and experience imagination as process rather than securely finished product.'
'Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern', (pp.60-61).
181 Beat Witschi, 'Defining a Scottish Identity', Books in Scotland, No.34 (1990), pp.5-6,
(p.6).
182 Edwin Morgan, Essays, (Cheshire: Carcanet Press, 1974), p. 167.
183 Ibid,p.\61.
Notes 173
184 Robert Crawford, 'Morgan's Critical Position' in Chapman 64, Spring/ Summer 1991,
pp.32-36, p.32.
185 'Despite the efforts of Hugh MacDiarmid to deal with the nameable real in contempo
rary experience, this aspect of his work has been least taken up and developed by oth
ers. Too many heads are attracted by the sand. There is a new provincialism - in a
movement which, in MacDiarmid at least, stretched out internationally and fought the
Philistines. Almost no interest has been taken by established writers in Scotland to the
important postwar literary developments in America and on the continent. Ignorance is
not apologised for. The Beat writers are dismissed as a throwback to the 1920s.' Es
says, p.MA.
186 'Morgan's Critical Position', p.36.
187 Essays,p.\lA
188 Ibid,p.m
189 For various examples of this see Morgan's Nothing Not Giving Messages: Reflections
on Work and Life (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990) edited by Hamish Whyte. On p.55,
Morgan comments: 'I do like the idea of contemporaneity. I was never greatly at
tracted by the idea of tradition. I positively enjoy the contemporary world and have a
sense of it, I think. I want, if possible, to reflect that in poetry, taking great risks, of
course in doing this.'
190 Ibid,p36.
191 Edwin Morgan, Hold Hands Among the Atoms (Glasgow: Mariscat Press, 1991), p.81.
192 Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p.456.
193 Ibid,p.A56
194 See, for example, Nothing Not Giving Messages, p.40.
195 Ibid, p.250.
196 Collected Poems, pMS.
197 Ibid,p.AA9.
198 'Outward Bound', Ibid, p.456
199 Collected Poems, p.456
200 Published in Hugh MacDiarmid: Complete Poems Volume One ed. Michael Grieve
and W.R. Aitken (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993), p.461.
201 Collected Poems, p.587.
202 Nothing Not Giving Messages, p.251.
203 G. Gregory Smith, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (London: Macmillan,
1919), p.19.
204 Morgan, 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' in Collected Poems, p.446.
205 Ibid,p.AA6
206 Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993), p.2.
174 Notes
207 'Kathleen Jamie interviewed by Lilias Fraser', Scottish Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 1,
pp. 15-23, p. 15.
208 Kathleen Jamie, The Queen ofSheba, (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994)
209 Ibid, p.20
210 Edwin Morgan 'Scotland and the World', Chapman 95, 2000, pp.2-15, p. 15
211 Ibid, p.\5.
212 Nations without Nationalism, p.59.
213 Harpham writes, 'For its part, Uterature represents the accessible form of ethical prin
ciples, which, like atoms, are invisible in themselves but cast a kind of "shadow".' He
goes on to suggest 'Making such arguments is part of the job description of criticism,
which stands in an ambivalent mid-region between ethics and Uterature, with aU-
giances to both.' Geoffrey Gait Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just
Society (London & Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p.ix.
Chapter 4
214 Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1997)
215 Richard Kearney, for example, refers to new relationships between politics, technology
and the media: 'The nation-state is falling into crisis. ReaUsing this, and fearful that the
people will also reahse it, those in power often begin to act as sovereign rulers or mon-
archs. They substitute communications propaganda for the assent of the people
(demos). They try to fill the "credibiUty gap" no longer by poUce or military force -
as in former times - but by media seduction or simulation.' (PI, 65).
216 'Not only do some of the theories of postmodernity often take for granted the existence
of nationhood, but some of the phenomena, which are being claimed as indicating the
end of nations, themselves reveal the continuing hold of nationaUst assumptions. There
is a cultural paradox: the theories of national identity and postmodernity, which assert
the decline of the nation-state, are being formulated at a time when a powerful nation,
the United States of America, is bidding for global hegemony. The global culture itself
has a national dimension, as the symbols of the United States appear as universal sym
bols.' Banal Nationalism (London: Sage PubUcations, 1995), (p.ll).
217 Zygmunt Bauman, in referring to this weakening of nationaUsm, also insists that na-
tionaUsm, as a project, has not reached its end. He writes: 'The current prohferation of
units claiming a status similar to the one which has been won historicaUy by older na
tion-state's does not testify that smaUer and weaker entities can now reasonably claim
or strive for viabiUty; it only testifies to the fact that viabihty has ceased to be a condi
tion of nation-state formation. Most significantly, it suggests - obUquely - the loss of
"viabiUty" in the old sense by such large and medium to large state organisms as could
claim to enjoy the classical triad of sovereignty in the "high modernity" era. The over
crowded UN building does not augur the ultimate triumph of the nationaUst principle -
but the coming end of the age when the social system used to be identified territorially
Notes 175
and population-wise with the nation-state (though not necessarily, let us repeat, the end
of the age of nationaUsm).' Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: BlackweU, 1993), (p.231).
218 In Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (London and New York: New York
University Press, 1999), Bmce Robbins also makes a connection between the media
and the generation of what he describes as forms of amoral American nationaUsm:
'For better or worse, the media seem perfectly capable of popularizing a shift from
cold war moraUsm to a scaled-back, amoral brand of nationaUsm. Among the media
vehicles of this new nationaUsm, for example, is the popular genre of violent, neome-
dievaUst science fiction, such as Alien movies and Predator, where postmodern
knights and cyborg creatures struggle on a darkling plain, neither exhibiting emblems
of good nor expecting to encounter emblems of evil, where victory often means only
self-preservation.' (p. 159).
219 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: PoUty Press, 1997)
220 Ibid,p.\9\
221 Where Bhabha's notion of in-betweenness in The Location of Culture, refers to a crea
tive 'third' space between traditional readings of the nation and readings of resistance,
as it is being used here, in-betweenness refers to the general instabihty of nations and
the potential restructuring of national identity. The role of the ethical, as developed
here, is to mediate through these positions, and is therefore perhaps not wholly dis
similar to Bhabha's urge to create new authorial positions.
222 Gerard Delanty, Modernity and Postmodernity: Knowledge, Power and the Self, (Lon
don: Sage PubUcations, 2000), (p.xii).
223 See, for example, Pheng Cheah and Bmce Robbins (ed.) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and
Feeling Beyond the Nation (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) or Timothy
Brennan At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (London & Cambridge: Har
vard University Press, 1997).
224 See, for example, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (ed.) Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985) and Chantal
Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Commu
nity (London: Verso, 1992).
225 'My argument so far is that recent Uterature on the idea of community points to a no
tion of community as a cognitive structure rooted in processes of communication, law
and democracy. Postmodern conceptions emphasise community in various ways as the
experience of difference, whereas legal theorists stress issues such as trust. Others,
such as Habermas and Apel, speak of community in terms of the reflexivity of com
munication. These approaches make the traditional notion of community as a symboUc
order redundant, for they aUow us to see community as a contested cultural imaginary.
In order to develop further this understanding of community, I shaU extend the idea of
the cognitive into a theory of the cultural imaginary and relate this to the new idea of
community as a postmodemised discourse beyond unity.' Gerard Delanty, Modernity
176 Notes
and Postmodernity: Knowledge, Power and the Self (London: Sage PubUcations,
2000), p.127.
226 Ibid,p.\2%.
227 Ibid,pA29.
228 In 'Living Your Own Life in a Runaway World: IndividuaUsation, GlobaUsation and
PoUtics', Ulrich Beck writes: 'We Uve in an age in which the social order of the na
tional state, class, ethnicity and the traditional family is in decline. The ethic of indi
vidual self-fulfilment and achievement is the most powerful current in modem society.
The choosing, deciding, shaping human being who aspires to be the author of his or
her own Ufe, the creator of an individual identity, is the central character of our time. It
is the fundamental cause behind changes in the family and the global gender revolution
in relation to work and poUtics. Any attempt to create a new sense of social cohesion
has to start from the recognition that individuaUsm, diversity and scepticism are writ
ten into Western culture.' in On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism WiU Hutton
and Anthony Giddens (eds), (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), pp. 164-174, p. 165.
229 'The post-traditional society is an ending; but it is also a beginning, a genuinely new
social universe of action and experience. What type of social order is it, or might it be
come? It is, as I have said, a global society, not in the sense of a world society but as
one of "indefinite space". It is one where social bonds have effectively to be made,
rather than inherited from the past - on the personal and more coUective levels this is
a fraught and difficult enterprise, but one also that holds out the promise of great re
wards. It is decentred in terms of authorities, but recentred in terms of opportunities
and dilemmas, because focussed on new forms of interdependence.' Giddens, Anthony
'Living in a Post-Traditional Society' in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott
Lash (eds) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern
Social Order (Cambridge: PoUty, 1994), pp.56-110, (p.107).
230 Giddens goes on: 'To regard narcissism, or even individualism, as at the core of the
post-traditional order is a mistake - certainly in terms of the potentials for the future
that it contains. In the domain of interpersonal Ufe, opening out to the other is the con
dition of social soUdarity; on the larger scale a proffering of the "hand of friendship"
within a global cosmopoUtan order is ethicaUy impUcit in the new agenda.' 'Living in
a Post-Traditional Society', (p. 107).
231 Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age, (p. 59).
232 The foUowing Conclusion will develop these ideas in more detail.
233 Beck, (p.169).
234 Ibid, (p.169).
235 Many critics, however, have been highly critical of postmodernism. See, for example,
Christopher Norris What's Wrong with Postmodernism?: Critical Theory and the Ends
of Philosophy (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) and Terry Eagleton
The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: BlackweU, 1996). This resistance to post-
Notes 111
modernism, and in particular to a postmodern ethics, wiU be discussed in more detail
towards the end of this chapter.
236 Delanty, Modernity and Postmodernity, p.121. In At Home in the World: Cosmopol
itanism Now, Timothy Brennan also highUghts the importance of self-critique begin
ning at home. (p. 10).
237 'Since the self, even as it is transformed by its interactions with the world, also trans
forms how that world seems to itself, it's system of self-securing is not thereby un
hinged nor is it "corrected" by cosmopohtanism. Rather, in enlarging its view "from
China to Pern", it may become all the more imperiaUstic, seeing in every horizon of
difference new peripheries of its own centraUty, new pathologies through which its
own normaUty may be defined and must be asserted.' Ibid, p.23.
238 In Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics (Buckingham: Open Univer
sity Press, 2000), Delanty suggests that 'GlobaUsation, then, is primarily about the
transformation of space. In this it is clearly connected with modernity, which was pri
marily a discourse of time. In modernity people saw in historical time visions of eman
cipation, which explains why all modem Utopias were located in a particular time con
sciousness. Today, it would appear that the focus has shifted from time to space, from
Utopia to "heteropologies", as Foucault (1986) beUeved was the case. The global trans
formation of space is radicaUy different from the modem project, which sought to de-
Umit space: it concerns the deterritoriaUsation of space.' (p.83).
239 Ibid,p.%5.
240 See John Urry Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century
(London: Routledge, 2000).
241 'How is one to confront the prevailing sense of discontinuity, the absence of a coherent
identity, the breakdown of inherited ideologies and beUefs, the insecurities of fragmen
tation? Is it possible to make the transition between past and future, between that
which is famiUar to us and that which is foreign?' (T, 9).
242 'The modernist tendency in Irish culture is characterised by a determination to demy-
thologise the orthodox heritage of tradition in so far as it lays constraints upon the
openness and pluraUty of experience. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus exempUfies this im
pulse when he speaks of trying to awaken from the "nightmare of history". He refuses
to serve that in which he no longer believes, whether it caU itself "home, fatherland or
church" .... Repudiating revivaUst nationaUsm as a "pale afterthought of Europe",
Joyce went into exile and chose an experimental aesthetic. Beckett too rejected the
myths of the Irish Literary Revival concentrating instead on the modernist problematic
of language itself - what he termed "the breakdown of the Unes of communication".
The privileged province of his exploration was to be the no-man's-land of the author's
own interior existence: an existence condemned to perpetual disorientation.' (T, 12).
243 In Postnationalist Ireland, Kearney writes: 'In endeavouring to go beyond negative
nationaUsm one must be wary, therefore, not to succumb to the opposite extreme of
178 Notes
anti-nationaUsm. Those who identify aU forms of nationaUsm with irredentist fanati
cism habituaUy do so in the name of some neutral standpoint that masks their own
ideological bias.' He then goes on to suggest: 'Surely what is required... is a transition
from traditional nationaUsm to a postnationaUsm which preserves what is valuable in
the respective cultural memories of nationaUsm (Irish and British) whilst superseding
them.' (PI, 58-59).
244 'To be tme to ourselves, as Joyce put it, is to be 'othered': to exist from our own time
frame in order to return to it, enlarged and enriched by the detour. This signals a new
attitude not only to culture but to history. The very notion of evolving historical peri
ods (tradition, modernity, etc) foUowing each other in causal order is put into question.
Rather than construing history as a continuity leading inexorably to a lost paradise or
forward to a guaranteed future, postmodernism views it as coUage. It resists the beUef
in history as inevitable progress or regress, recommending instead that we draw from
old and new in "recreative" non-dogmatic ways. The "post" in postmodernism refers
then not just to what comes after modernity. It signals rather another way of seeing
things, which transmutes tinear history into a multipUcity of time-spans.' (PI, 65).
Conclusion
245 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p.32.
246 'The concept of cultural difference focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of cul
tural authority: the attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is
itself produced only in the moment of differentiation. And it is the very authority of
culture as a knowledge of referential truth which is at issue in the concept and moment
of enunciation. The enunciative process introduces a spUt in the performative present
of cultural identification; a spUt between the traditional culturaUst demand for a model,
a tradition, a community, a stable system of reference, and the necessary negation of
the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the
poUtical present, as a practice of domination, or resistance. The struggle is often be
tween the historicist teleological or mythical time and the narrative of traditionaUsm -
of the right or the left - and the shifting, strategicaUy displaced time of the articulation
of a historical poUtics of negotiation.... The enunciation of cultural difference prob-
lematises the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level
of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in sig
nifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the
name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of his
torical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the archaic. That it
eration negated our sense of the origins of the stmggle. It undermines our sense of the
homogenising effects of cultural symbols and icons, by questioning our sense of the
authority of cultural synthesis in general.' Ibid, p. 34-35.
Notes 179
247 'Cultural difference must not be understood as the free play of polarities and pluraUties
in the homogenous empty time of the national community. The jarring of meaning and
values generated in the process of cultural interpretation is an effect of the perplexity
of Uving in the timinal spaces of national society that I have tried to trace. Cultural dif
ference, as a form of intervention, participates in a logic of supplementary subversion
similar to the strategies of minority discourse. The question of cultural difference faces
us with a disposition of knowledges or a distribution of practices that exist beside each
other, abseits designating a form of social contradiction or antagonism that has to be
negotiated rather than sublated. The difference between subjunctive sites and represen
tations of social Ufe have to be articulated without surmounting the incommensurable
meanings and judgements that are produced within the process of transcultural nego
tiation.' Ibid, p. 162.
248 Berthold Schoene-Harwood '"Emerging as the Other of Our Selves" - Scottish Multi-
culturaUsm and the ChaUenge of the Body in Postcolonial Representation', Scottish
Literary Journal, May (1998), Vol. 25, No.l, pp.54-72, (p.55).
249 Berthold Schoene, 'A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Post-
colonial Condition', Scotlands 2:1 (1995), pp.107-122, (p.120). In his later article
'"Emerging as the Other of Ourselves": Scottish MulticulturaUsm and the ChaUenge of
the Body in Postcolonial Representation', Schoene-Harwood refers specificaUy to
Bhabha's conceptions of cultural diversity and cultural difference as a means of expU-
cating some of the underlying complexities of Scottish postcoloniahsm. In this article,
however, while attempting to map out the need for models of cultural difference,
Schoene-Harwood also at times tends to resort to forms of binary thinking. With refer
ence to Bhabha's conceptions of cultural diversity and cultural difference, he suggests
that Scottish Studies needs to become more aware of differences between Highland
and Lowland Scotland, yet tends to do so to the extent of estabUshing a strict opposi
tion between the two, therefore also coUapsing cultural difference into a form of multi-
culturaUsm. Bhabha's conception of cultural difference, however, is an attempt to
break from this kind of identity thinking.
250 'The main issue is not any more the status of the Scottish nation as a minority within
the United Kingdom but rather the status of minority communities within Scottish so
ciety; not essential Scottishness but rather the differences and similarities between dif
ferent kinds and ways of Scottishness' 'A Passage to Scotland', (p.l 15).
251 Ibid, (p.l 16).
252 Michael Gardiner, 'Democracy and Scottish PostcoloniaUty', Scotlands, 3:2, (1996),
pp.24-41,(p.24).
253 'But of course since Scotland is not post-colonial but nationaUy postcolonial, the na
tion aheady carries oppressive associations and the next rum is not to the nation as
such but the nation within postcolonial theory - multiple identifications within metro-
poUtan terms - to articulate national needs within acting subjects.' Ibid, (p.29).
180 Notes
254 Ibid,(p.3A).
255 Ibid,(p.36).
256 'Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would
suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the
subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis
and "situate" the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic
use of positive essentiaUsm in a scrupulously visible poUtical interest... This would al
low them to use the critical force of anti-humanism, in other words, even as they share
its constitutive paradox: that the essentiaUsing moment, the object of their criticism, is
irreducible.' See 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography' in The Spivak
Reader ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.203-
235, (p.215).
257 As Brown, McCrone and Paterson state in Politics and Society in Scotland (London:
MacmiUan, 1996), 'The Scottish question should be interpreted as a manifestation of
major social and poUtical changes in the late twentieth century, and specificaUy the re
definition of the state. This process can be seen clearly at the level of the British state
which has undergone a major re-orientation towards its European partners, and signifi
cant chaUenges from its constituent nations. The Scottish question becomes a question
of the new world order.' (p.221).
258 Longley also suggests, however, that 'Today's textual battles are more often joined
between NationaUsts and 'revisionists' than between CathoUc and Protestant Ireland as
such'. (TLS, 23).
259 For Longley, many feminists have also been guilty of recycUng NationaUst vocabulary
'when the canonical chips are down', and have therefore compromised their poUtical
aspirations in order to accommodate the often patriarchal assumptions of NationaUsm.
(TLS, 48).
260 'Culture in Ireland is a range of practices, expressions, traditions, by no means ho-
mogenously spread nor purely confined to the island. PoUtical Irishness, on the other
hand, is the ideology of identity ("Irish to the core") mainly packaged by the GaeUc
League, which, twined with Catholicism, served to bind the new state. In the RepubUc,
the strings of this package have got looser and looser, and much of its substance has
leaked out. In the North, Sinn Fein stiU tries to deliver a fossiUsed and belated ver
sion.' (TLS, 176).
261 See Longley's discussion of Terry Eagleton and his Field Day production of Saint
Oscar. 'Field Day's production of Saint Oscar looked odd and out of date in Dublin
because it was an instance of the reimported NationaUst propaganda... Its author...
used Wilde to present a timeless thesis about imperiaUst oppression. Field Day's ea
gerness to coUude with the hoary stereotypes of the EngUsh hard left seems signifi
cant.' (TLS, 183).
Notes 181
262 These debates can be clearly traced in debates stretching over the past few years in the
Irish Studies Review.
263 Gerry Smyth, 'The Past, the Post, and the Utterly Changed: InteUectual ResponsibiUty
and Irish Cultural Criticism', in Briggs, Hyland & Sammels (eds) Sarah Briggs, Paul
Hyland & Neil Sammells (eds) Reviewing Ireland: Essays and Interviews from Irish
Studies Review (Bath: SuUs Press), pp.240-250.
264 'Moreover, a critical ideology based on the endless revelation of an absence at the
heart of modem Irish identity might be considered frustrating when it comes to the
question: what is to be done? The Indian critic Gayatri Spivak has advanced the notion
of a 'strategic essentiaUsm' with regard to the paradox on which modem conceptions
of identity rely. This, along with Foucault's "ironic maturity" and Derrida's develop
ing concern with "actuaUty", seems to offer some purchase in practical poUtics. Yet, as
Alan Sinfield pointed out in a recent lecture, the optimism evinced by critics such as
Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler with regard to the effectiveness of strategic attempts to
actuaUse instabiUty and fragmentation can be seen to be misplaced when confronted
with a straightgeist - racial, sexual, economic - which flourishes in conditions of
change and flexibiUty.' Ibid, (p.245).
265 'Irish Studies, Postcolonial Theory and the "New" EssentiaUsm', Irish Studies Review,
Vol. 7, No.2, pp.211-220, (p.211).
266 Ibid, (p.212).
267 'Varieties of NationaUsm: Post-Revisionist Irish Studies', Irish Review, No. 15, (1996),
pp.34-38, (p.34).
268 As Brown, McCrone and Paterson state in Politics and Society in Scotland, 'SmaU
nations are like corks in the sea. They are the first indicators of the way currents are
flowing, and that the tide is turning.' (p.215).
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Index
Allan, Dot, 27 Anderson, Benedict, 4, 31, 49, 52-
60, 86-7, 90, 100, 132, 155, 156 160
Anderson, Carol, 23 Arnold, Mathew, 148 Bauman, Zygmunt, 6, 56, 127-33,
174 Beck, Ulrich, 134,176 Beveridge, Craig, 4, 49-50, 52, 70-
78,165 Bhabha, Homi, 5-6, 30-34, 40, 42,
90-93, 100, 141, 142, 144, 148-149, 152, 175, 179, 181
BiUig, Michael, 126, 128 Black, David, 36-38 Blanchot, Maurice, 134 Bold, Alan, 10, 11, 35, 36, 98, 153,
163 Braidotti, Rosi, 33, 34 Brennan, Timothy, 135, 177 Byrne, John, 40, 148 Caledonian Antisyzygy, 3, 61, 66,
69,92,119-120,144,151 Campbell, Ian, 13 Carswell, Catherine, 12, 22-28 Christianson, Aileen, 23 Conn, Stewart, 98 Cowan, Edward, 13,22 Craig, Cairns, 4, 34, 35, 43-52, 80-
89, 92, 97, 102, 103, 106, 146, 157, 159, 163, 167
Crawford, Robert, 47, 65,112-113 Deane, Seamus, 3,146-147 Delanty, Gerard, 132-137, 175, 177
-178 Derrida, Jacques, 30, 107, 148, 171,
181 Deterritorialisation, 57, 123, 131-
133, 136-40 Eliot, T.S., 8, 84, 167
Ethics, 4-7, 76, 92-96, 123-150, 171, 174, 175, 177
Fanon, Frantz, 4, 71 Featherstone, Mike, 91-92,102 Finlay, Richard, 13,15,22 Galloway, Janice, 38, 39 Gardiner, Michael, 143-145 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, 12-14 Giddens, Anthony, 103, 130, 133,
176 Gifford, Douglas, 23, 39, 40-41,
158-159 Globalisation, 41, 55, 56, 91, 123,
131, 134, 136-137,158,176-177 Gray, Alasdair, 5, 10, 11, 18, 39,
99,100-111,116,169,172 Gray, John, 69 Grieve, Christopher Murray. See
MacDiarmid, Hugh Grigor, Barbara and Murray, 76, 83 Hall, Stuart, 97,144,159 Harpham, Geoffrey Gait, 96-97,
110,114,123,169,174 Hart, Francis Russell, 42, 43, 82,
166 Harvey, David, 104, 137 Harvie, Christopher, 109 Hechter, Michael, 48 Hendry, Joy, 7, 9, 10,11, 35, 39,41 Hobsbawm, Eric, 49, 51, 63, 89 Jameson, Fredric, 161 Jamie, Kathleen, 5,99, 120, 121 Kailyard, 12-14, 17, 21, 25, 34, 61,
111,114,156,159 Kearney, Richard, 4, 5, 138-142,
149,151, 174, 177 Kellas, James, 47, 67 Kelman, James, 36, 111 Kermode, Frank, 171 Kristeva, Julia, 5, 95,96,122,169 Levinas, Emmanuel, 92, 93
194 Index
Longley, Edna, 1, 2, 145-147, 151, 180
Lumsden, Alison, 109-110 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 91, 130,
151 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 2, 8, 9, 12, 14,
15-29, 40, 42, 44, 46, 66, 111-113,117-119,140,151-158,173
MacMillan, Dorothy, 23 Maley, Willy, 148, 149 McCrone, David, 74, 77-79, 158,
159, 161,181 Mcllvanney, William, 36 McMillan, Joyce, 43, 52, 68, 89, 98,
99 Mitchison, Naomi, 22 Morgan, Edwin, 5, 99, 105, 111-
122, 173 Muir, Edwin, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15-22,
28, 29, 37, 43, 44, 69, 84, 151, 153, 154, 156
Muir, Willa, 12, 22-27 Nairn, Tom, 4, 49, 50-52, 58-70,
78, 82, 83, 92, 154, 155, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165
Nationalism, 1, 3-6, 11, 14, 15, 19, 20,29,31,34,35,42-80,83,85, 88,99, 111, 122, 125, 126, 127, 133-150
Noble, Andrew, 20, 21,153 Osmond, John, 34 Poole,Ross, 125, 132 Postcolonialism, 1, 3, 4, 6, 143-50,
179
Postmodernism, 1-6, 28-44, 51, 55-60, 66, 70, 92, 94, 102, 107, 110, 127-150
Postnationalism, 4, 6, 136-40, 149, 178
Power, William, 12,14 Revisionism, 1, 2, 6,147-150, 151 Robbins, Bruce, 175 Riach, Alan, 28 Schoene, Berthold, 142, 143, 147,
159, 179 Scott, Walter, 7-9, 13, 16, 44, 85,
89,156 Scottish Literary Renaissance, 2, 3,
8, 11, 12-28, 39, 40, 42, 111, 154, 155, 159
Siebers, Tobin, 171 Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 135 Smith, G. Gregory, 119,151 Smyth, Gerry, 147,148 Spivak, Gayatri, 3, 144-148, 180,
181 Stevenson, Randall, 172 Tartanry, 36, 76, 84, 162, 167 Todd, Richard, 158 Torrington, Jeff, 36 Turnbull, Ronald, 4, 49, 50, 52, 70-
79,157, 165 Wallace, Gavin, 38 Waugh, Patricia, 107 Welsh, Irvine, 89 Whyte, Christopher, 35, 157 Witschi, Beat, 110,111,169 Woolf, Virginia, 23, 25,170 Young, Robert, 92-93,168