Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New

A provisional re-mapping of Scotland's post-devolution literary culture, these fifteen essays explore how literature, theatre and visual art have both shaped and reflected the 'new Scotland' promised by parliamentary devolution. Chapters explore leading figures such as Alasdair Gray, David Greig, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, while also paying particular attention to women's writing by Kate Atkinson, A. L. Kennedy, Denise Mina, Ali Smith, Louise Welsh, and writers of colour such as Bashabi Fraser, Annie George, Tendai Huchu, Chin Li and Raman Mundair. Tracing continuities with 1990s debates alongside 'edges of the new' visible since Indyref 2014, these critics offer an in-depth study of Scotland's vibrant literary production in the period of devolution, viewed both within and beyond the frame of national representation.

Table of Contents:
AcknowledgementsList of illustrations Introduction - Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon, Camille Manfredi, Scott Hames 1. ‘Temporal deconstructions: narrating the ruins of time’ - Glenda Norquay2. ‘“They Peer at my Dark Land”: the ethics of storytelling in twenty-first Scottish Women’s writing’ - Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon3.‘“Connected to Time”: Ali Smith’s Anachronistic Scottish Cosmopolitanism’ - Fiona McCulloch4. ‘Democracy and the Indyref novel’ - Scott Hames 5. ‘Shifting grounds: writers of colour in 21st-century Scottish literature’ - Silke Stroh 6. ‘Mapping Escape: Geography and Genre’ - Timothy Baker7. ‘“Whom do you belong to, loch?” Ownership, Belonging and Transience in the Writings of Kathleen Jamie’ - Amy Player8. ‘Misty Islands and Hidden Bridges’ - Kevin MacNeil9. ‘The Scots Language is a Science Fiction Project’ - Harry Josephine Giles10. Convivial Correctives to Metrovincial Prejudice: Kevin MacNeil’s The Stornoway Way and Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag - Maggie Scott 11. ‘Scottish Audio- and Film-Poetry: Writing, Sounding, Imaging 21st-Century Scotland’ - Camille Manfredi 12. ‘Post-National Polyphonies: Communities in Absentia on the Contemporary Scottish Stage’ - Jeanne Schaaf13. ‘Where Words and Images Collide: Will Maclean’s Intertextual Collaborations’ - Lindsay and Donald Blair 14. ‘Erasure and Reinstatement: Gray the Artist, Across Space and Form’ - Rodge Glass15. ‘Transforming cultural memory: the shifting boundaries of post-devolutionary Scottish literature’ - Carla Sassi Notes on contributorsIndex

About the Author :
Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon is Professor of Scottish Literature at Aix-Marseille Université (AMU), France. She has published extensively on 20th and 21st-century fiction. Her previous publications include Women and Scotland: Literature, Culture, Politics (edited volume, Presses Universitaires de Franche Comté, 2020) and The Space of Fiction: Voices from Scotland in a post-devolution age, (Scottish Literature International, 2015). Camille Manfredi is Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Western Brittany (UBO), France. Her previous publications include Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds (edited volume, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Scott Hames is Senior Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Stirling, and author of The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution (EUP, 2020), which draws extensively on post-1960s magazines and their debates. With Malcolm Petrie, he led the AHRC-funded Scottish Magazines Network on which this book is based. With Eleanor Bell, he co-founded the International Journal of Scottish Literature. He has edited or co-edited closely related volumes on Scottish Writing After Devolution (EUP, 2022), Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence (Word Power, 2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (EUP, 2010).

Review :
The through-line of Scottish Writing After Devolution is the combined ‘crisis’ and ‘interregnum’ of this period. But these essays don’t hide in indeterminacy. They show Scottish literature and Scottish literary criticism breaking in dozens of directions – none too comfortable with the nation-lodestar at which they’ve often been pointed.