The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature ed. by Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney (review)

The essays contained in this volume provide a broad overview of Scottish literary writing from the earliest times to the present day. It represents an invaluable resource for anyone beginning their exploration of a particular period, author, or genre; but with contributions from many of the leading scholars in their respective fields, it will also reward the more knowledgeable reader with fresh insights and new perspectives.

Among the most thought-provoking essays in this collection is the first, Thomas Clancy's on 'Scottish Literature before Scottish Literature'. By effectively placing the origins of Scottish Literature (as this volume understands it) before any identifiable 'national tradition' in Gaelic, Scots or English, Clancy does more than allow for the inclusion of writing in Old Welsh, Old English, Old French, Norse and Latin in the Scottish canon; he also draws attention to the inevitable arbitrariness of what, from the writing of the succeeding centuries, we include in and exclude from that canon. This expansiveness of scope and suspension of question-begging definitions of what counts as 'Scottish' is vindicated in the essays which follow Clancy's. Most of those which cover pre-twentieth-century topics provide the reader with a thorough grounding in the literary history of a particular period (Alessandra Petrina on the Middle Ages; Sarah Dunnigan on the Reformation and Renaissance; Leith Davis on the eighteenth century before Burns; Andrew Nash on the Victorians), or an introduction to the work of a particular writer (Nigel Leask on Burns, Ian Duncan on Scott, Penny Fielding on Stevenson). Peter Mackay's survey of the Gaelic tradition is particularly useful, demonstrating how thoroughly Gaelic writing participated in the developments chronicled in the other essays.

Twentieth-century and contemporary writing present greater challenges of perspective and categorisation. Robert Ellis Hosmer provides a comprehensive account of Muriel Spark's career in fiction, albeit concentrating on the moral and theological content of the novels at the expense of attention to the extraordinary formal technique which surely justifies Spark's getting a chapter to herself. Otherwise, twentieth-century fiction is covered under three separate headings. David Goldie's survey of popular fiction deploys fine formal and political discrimination, while McIlvanney's essay on 'The Glasgow Novel' traces the representation of Scotland's metropolis from Defoe to the present day, an approach which also allows the inclusion of the commercially successful alongside the canonically literary, and reaps similarly rich rewards. The story Cairns Craig tells about the politics of Scottish fiction since 1979 remains one with which any student of modern Scotland needs to engage, and it is given succinct and stimulating articulation here in 'Devolution and the Scottish Novel'. The price paid for this division of labour is that, while he features in both the McIlvanney and Craig essays, James Kelman does not get the extended consideration that his importance perhaps merits: he must have been a candidate for a stand-alone essay such as that afforded Spark. On the other hand, Scott Lyall's use of the career of Hugh MacDiarmid to introduce the other significant writers of the 'Scottish Renaissance' of the 1920s and 30s has the useful effect of avoiding any simple endorsement of MacDiarmid's view of his own centrality. Gerard Carruthers rounds off the volume with a fascinating introduction to the literature of the Scottish colonial diaspora.

Craig aside, the essays which advance a thesis, instead of surveying a field, are the least rewarding in this collection. Fiona Stafford's topic, modern Scottish poetry, defies the imposition of a unifying angle. That Scottish poets, from Morgan on, stopped worrying about the 'language question' that had so vexed MacDiarmid's generation, provides her with a plausible starting-point. But Stafford attempts to give this negative characterisation a positive content by linking it to the end of the Cold War: 'Power relations no longer seemed to involve the inevitable oppression of minorities, while increasing awareness of international diversity and voluntary economic union...