“Scotland’s a Sense of Change”

Ilka Schwittlinsky

“Scotland’s a Sense of Change”: History and the Land in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still

ISBN 978-3-86821-986-9, 330 S., kt., € 36,50 (2023)

(Scottish Studies in Europe, Bd. 3)

National identities are constructed around a nation’s history as well as the territory it occupies. Scotland, which has been a stateless nation since the Union of Parliaments in 1707, had no state institutions to disseminate this identity. So in their absence, literature stepped into the breach and kept Scotland’s separate identity alive. Scottish literature, therefore, ideally lends itself to tracing the changes to Scottish identity over the course of time. This book analyses and compares two panoramic Scottish texts, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932-1934) and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010) in order to map the developments Scottish identity underwent during the 20th century, in which Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom was radically re-thought, leading to devolution and the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and finally culminating in a robust movement for Scottish independence, which survived defeat in the 2014 Independence Referendum and still shapes public discourse as well as government policy in Scotland today.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)