And the Land Lay Still

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The full rigours of a politicized assertion of Scottishness would have to wait for the debates of 2012–14, however. In 1983, Joyce McMillan felt that the ‘Predicament of the Scottish Writer’ – updated from Edwin Muir’s 1936 diagnosis in Scott and Scotland – was marked by an over-developed reflex of self-assertion, noting that the Scottish cultural establishment ‘cherishes its hard-won consciousness of the ways in which Scottish culture has been discriminated against, and tends to demand that that consciousness never be let slip; and it is at this point that the artistic rot set in’ ( McMillan 1983, 69). Its ill-effects may be literary and aesthetic, but the remedy is clearly political: The destructive obsession with the need to emphasise and preserve the ‘Scottishness’ of our writing far beyond what comes naturally and truthfully to writers will persist for as long as Scotland remains in a political limbo; in other words, it will last until Scotland either becomes a full nation-state, or loses its sense of nationhood altogether. ( McMillan 1983, 70) Other voices rather welcomed the bracing effect of the call-up papers, or devolution’s nearest equivalent. Writing in the wake of the failed 1979 referendum on a Scottish Assembly, Tom Nairn took heart from the harsh division exposed between the ‘windy, sleekit, after-dinner “Patriotism”’ of middle-class Scotland and the hard political choice imposed by the Scotland Act. Despite the general malaise which followed, wrote Nairn, ‘a great deal of spineless self-affirmation was blown away in the result’.

The novel was enjoyed by everyone in the group - which is no mean feat as there are usually lots of different opinions around the room and few books gain a unanimous accolade! The book focuses on the characters presented in these photographs, which span post-war Scotland across geographies and social classes from the homeless to senior politicians. Their disparate stories present a collage that highlights the highs and lows of modern Scottish society. [1] Critical reception [ edit ] Most novels I’ve read don’t dig quite as deeply into the past as this, and the few that do don’t in …Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2020, Grimoire is a new and thrilling take on Scottish folk tales. Narrated by a doomed shape-shifter, Grimoire tells folkloric tales of violence and magic, witches and selkies, and of the beauty and hostility of the Scottish landscape itself, which is as much a character as any of the creatures of this book. If contesting an integrated British historical narrative was key to these Whitehall debates of the 1970s, the question of Scotland’s ‘distinct values and way of life’ were being explored with great energy by writers and scholars. Here the problem was blank space, rather than competing stories. During our first workshop, Cairns Craig argued that the explosion of Scottish historical writing over the past few decades represents the ‘filling-in of what was a kind of emptiness in the Scottish past’. For Craig the energies which led to Holyrood originate in the recovery of national historical memory, with magazines such as Radical Scotland and Cencrastus playing a key role: There is no strong ideological pulse beating through devolution, no political theology hovering above the pragmatic fudging of institutional reform. This makes the meaning of devolution both conveniently flexible and somewhat unstable, both as a policy and as an object of knowledge. Perhaps appropriately for an enterprise involving the deliberate erosion of central authority, devolution is always susceptible to being commandeered and re-defined, bent to stronger narrative impulses than those of its tinkering architects. The winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award 2010, And the Land Lay Still is a masterful insight into Scotland's history in the twentieth century and a moving, beautifully written novel of intertwined stories. I didn't set out deliberately to follow the Gothic tradition, but there's no question that some of that Hogg and Stevenson stuff does speak to me in a weird way. I am interested in how the past continues to influence the present and how the present changes the way we think about the past."

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Scottish literature is some of the best in the world and it’s shaped many incredible writers. If you like reading dark, interesting, and thrilling, then you’ll love these Scottish books. it had much earlier declared cultural devolution, both in the radical voices of new Scottish writing – from James Kelman to Matthew Fitt, from Janice Galloway to Ali Smith – and in the rewriting of Scottish cultural history that produced, in the 1980s and 1990s, a new sense of the richness and the autonomy of Scotland’s past cultural achievements. ( Craig 2003, 39)There’s no getting away from it, the nights are fair drawing in. So embrace the falling leaves, cold …

Its findings, eventually published in the 1973 Kilbrandon Report, set the process of Scottish devolution into deliberately retarded motion. Comments ranged from how much readers enjoyed the fact that all the story strands wove together so satisfyingly at the end, to one lady who admitted that, being English, not only had she gained an interesting slant on recent history as an “outsider”, but she had also learned new Scots words she had never heard before. Trust the story . … the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can’t; the story can only ever be itself.’Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning debut novel, Shuggie Bain, is a stunning masterpiece of modern Scottish literature.A book that has shaken the landscape of modern Scottish books, and for good reason.

Iris’ goal is to met with Geillis Duncan, a woman who has one night left to live before she is hanged for the crime of witchcraft.

2014 and all that

The idea behind this was to give the appearance of doing something, which would avoid the need for real action for as long as the commission was deliberating. According to Wilson, the commission was designed to spend years taking minutes, but in public it gave the appearance that the government was taking the issue seriously. It was hoped that, by the time the commission reported, the SNP would have gone away. ( Finlay 2004, 322) 7 This is easily one of the most impactful and important queer Scottish books in years, by a powerful voice amongst transgender authors.