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Literary Review
Re-imagining Scotland
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
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The volume attempts to rediscover what constitutes ‘Scottish’ identity.
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The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, edited by Berthold Schoene, Edinburgh University Press, p.424, £19.99
The cover design of The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature is a refreshingly cheerful one. The colours are loud and striking. The images are perhaps slightly oblique, but they quite truly describe the bold, vibrant voices and views within the book. Quirkily called “Woolly Jumper”, the illustration replicates a painting by the Scottish artist Rowena Laing which re-imagines the new nature and culture of Scotland. This may be an unusual cover for a weighty collection of 42 critical essays but it palpably strikes the seminal note of the volume which is an attempt to rediscover what constitutes the identity of “Scottishness” when altered by political and cultural changes. The Companion finds a crucial way into the imagination of the contemporary age by examining the role of literary history. In identifying the imaginative patterns and their related pressures, the volume convincingly captures the new manifestations of the creative and the critical energies produced during the Scottish devolution and post-devolution, chiefly, since 1997. Enthused by the evolution of the new writing and the cheerful change which strikingly altered the literary culture of contemporary Scotland, Berthold Schoene, the editor, records with perfect expertise the critical interventions in contemporary Scottish literature. In this mammoth enterprise, Schoene has wisely broadened the scope of scholarly enquiry to include media arts, crime and children’s fiction alongside literary works. Beckoning the way forward to new areas of critical interrogation, The Companion makes a bold breakthrough in destabilising definitive and defined ways of how we may read or write.
Varied contexts
While the book celebrates a happy fad of pluralism in rendering Scotland as being varied, dynamic and democratic, the selection process of including “varied” authors tends to provoke a controversy. Which authors? And why? Literary criticism often shapes canons and determines who secures a place in the crucial list of who gets read. Are there dangers of canonical associations in such inclusions? However, the constructive effect of Schoene’s list is the ways in which it allows the emergence of varied contexts within which broader resonances of the writers’ work have surfaced, initiating a subtle dialogue between the authors.
The Companion falls into four main categorical frames of critical diagnosis, namely, contexts, genres, authors and topics. Within these structured frames, issues ranging from globalism, cosmopolitanism to nationhood and identity to immigration, ethnicity, sexuality and race are discussed. The opening essay, “Reconstituting Scottishness”, by Schoene investigates the notion of the cosmopolitan and argues how post-devolution Scottish literature is about to lose its Scottishness and if this is desirable or not. “Scottish Literature in Media’ by Andrew Crumey, “Twenty-One collections for the Twenty-first Century’ by Christopher Whyte, “New Weegies” by Alan Bisset (a delightful rendition of Glasgow’s rapid transformations) and “Subaltern Scotland” by Stephanie Lehner pursue the question of identity and how it might be devised in the future. Colin Nicholson’s essay, “Towards a Scottish Theatrocracy” and John Corbett’s “A Double realm: Scottish Literary Translation” offer new insights into the art of syncretising mixed forms. Contributions by Gavin Wallace, Zoë Strachan, Suhayl Saadi, Ian Brown, Valentina Bold, Joanne Winning and A.L. Kennedy, to mention a few, are refreshingly new although perhaps slightly askew. They maintain an engaging dialogue between the past and the present, tradition and innovation, literary and non-literary forms.
Undeniably, then, this volume is about change and the promise of cultural proliferation as a source of imaginative strength. The result is a vivid pluralistic vision which provocatively reveals not just a Scotland but many varied “scotlands”.
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