Possible Scotlands
Price:
$100.00 (04)Description
No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. If this statement sounds extreme, it echoes the tone that criticism of Scott and his culture has taken through the twentieth century. Scott is supposed to have provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future--that pushed it "out of history." Scotland has become a place so absorbed in nostalgia that it could not construct a politics for a changing world.Possible Scotlands disagrees. It argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, also provided for a national future. They do not tell the story of a Scotland lost in time and lacking value. Instead they open up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. This book reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's nineteenth-century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Indeed, Scott invites readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. Scott's texts and his nation are alive in their constant retelling. Scott was an author for Scotland's new times.
Reviews
"A commendably brave, interventionist book."--Gerard Carruthers, Scotia
"An excellent study."--Alison Lumsden, Studies in Hogg and His World
"In Possible Scotlands , Caroline McCraken-Flesher puts a bold new post-devolution spin on the literary and cultural relationship of national ideas, and offers a strong defense, both national and densely theoretical, of the figure who most troubles this relationship, Walter Scott."--Judith Wilt, Studies in Romanticism
"McCracken-Flesher opposes any unified or developmental view of Scott's career, attending instead to the ways in which each novel reconsiders the challenge of narrating a nation so as to continually undo any static view of the nation and its history. She reads Scott as a lively and thoroughly contemporary author (with a number of examples of his recent currency in official and unofficial culture).--SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900)
"Possible Scotlands represents a novel and, in some ways, overdue treatment of Scott through the lends of postcolonial and poststructuralist theories whose currency reflect McCracken-Flesher's treatment of Scott as continuously current in discourses on culture and nation in Scotland."-Andrea Cabajsky, Universite de Moncton
"McCracken-Flescher's intriguing new Scott spills out of the Waverley novels into the contexts of Scottish media and political spectacle. Admirably researched." -- The Cambridge Quarterly
About the Author(s)
Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Professor, Department of English, University of Wyoming
