The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Novel

This Cambridge Companion takes as its topic two terms that, in the field of literary studies, historically have been contested: ‘Scottish’ and ‘novel’. Accounts of the latter have attempted to distinguish the novel from other fictional narrative forms, contrasting it to romance, history or life-writing. Literary critics and historians have made similar distinctions about nationality, silently assimilating some Scottish authors, such as Tobias Smollett and Margaret Oliphant, into British literary history, whilst relegating others, such as James Hogg and George MacDonald, to a separate Scottish literary history, and yet others, such as John Galt and Catherine Helen Spence, to the colonial literary histories of Canada and Australia. In recognition of these contestations, this volume takes a capacious approach to its key terms. It includes chapters on a variety of genres and traditions of fiction, some unique to Scotland and some common to other Anglophone literatures but developing particular inflections in a Scottish context. The volume includes works produced by writers of Scottish birth who may have spent much of their lives beyond Scotland’s borders and works by writers born elsewhere, who have come to reside in or declared affiliations with Scotland. It maintains that the novel ‘rises’ quite differently in Scotland than in England but acknowledges that the Scottish novel is part of broader Anglophone and European literary histories. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Novel challenges dominant narratives of the Scottish novel’s development, which have tended to celebrate the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century as moments of national, and nationalist, literary flourishing, while representing the Victorian period, with its unionist orientation, as a nadir in the novel’s development. By contrast, our volume takes account of the international concerns, both thematic and aesthetic, of Romantic genres, including the historical and regional novels. and of Modernist Scottish fiction, whilst also attending to the different investments in Scottishness of genres of Victorian fiction, including the domestic novel, the colonial novel, and Gothic fiction. Research on the mid-to-late twentieth-century Scottish novel has also focused overwhelmingly on expressions of cultural nationalism through the working-class male perspectives employed by authors such as William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Irvine Welsh. The Companion’s chapters on ‘Gender, Sexuality, and the Novel’, ‘Urban Fiction’, ‘Novels of Black and Asian Scotland’, ‘The Catholic Novel’ and ‘Gaelic Novels’ situate the diverse identities represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Scottish novels in a way that challenge any notion of an authentic Scottish identity and its inherence to a particular genre. A focus on cultural nationalism has also obscured Scottish novelists’ success in genre fiction, particularly science fiction and crime and detective fiction. Scottish genre fiction shows how global concerns can be rooted in local environments, while modern environmental fiction demonstrates concerns beyond nation-state sovereignty and cultural nationalism.Scottish novelists are breaching Scottish borders in other ways, too, by claiming international success and global reach. Since Walter Scott’s wide-ranging achievements with the Waverley novels, Scottish novelists have defined, and defied, Scotland. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Novel charts that fascinating narrative.

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