Scotland had been called ‘the world’s best hypothetical nation’ (Andrew O’Hagan) and a place where myth is ‘never driven out by reality, or by reason, but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper). This course explores the role of writers – from Walter Scott to Irvine Welsh – in shaping the ‘imagined community’ of Scotland. Topics to be discussed include: the myth of the Highlands; historical fiction; the Scottish adventure novel; writing the city; ‘Tartan Noir’; postcolonial Scotland; literature and empire; writing the Scottish Diaspora. The set texts will be supplemented by key critical and theoretical essays, and our readings will be contextualized with reference to historiography in the form of T.M. Devine’s The Scottish Nation, 1700-2007.
T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700-2007 (Penguin)
Walter Scott, Waverley (Penguin)
John Galt, Annals of the Parish (Oxford)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (Penguin)
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (Penguin)
Lewis Grasic Gibbon, A Scots Quair (Polygon)
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin)
Alasdair Gray, Lanark: a Life in 4 Books (Canongate)
Irvine Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares
Louise Welsh, The Cutting Room (Canongate)
Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief (Vintage)
In addition, the course reader will feature a variety of poems, short stories, plays and critical writings by a range of Scottish writers from the eighteenth century to the present.