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"And the Land Lay Still"- Worldmaking, Topography and the Modern Scots Novel
Zdraveska, Marija ; Clark, Colin Steele (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
The purpose of this study is to analyse the manner in which contemporary Scottish literature imagines Scotland, especially in the light of the recent political changes in the country, as well as the changes in the perception of its national identity in global terms. The focus will be on the literary representations of the Scottish landscape, following Cairns Craig argument that locality is crucial to Scottish literature and its national imagination. While the fictional rendering of both the rural and urban Scottish landscape might have acted as a 'paradigm of national consciousness' in the past, in contemporary Scottish literature it can now be seen as a form of speculative worldmaking that reflects, satirizes and debates the social and political dispensation of the nation, and aims towards the subversion of the representation of a single Scottish national identity. The texts under consideration all deploy the Scottish social and topographical panorama in a unique manner which results in a literary representation of multiple versions of Scotland that often coexist together. This thesis traces the development of this thematic concern in the contemporary Scots novel from the 1980s to the present through the analysis of the works of three major Scottish contemporary writers: Alasdair Gray, Janice...
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