Escritoras escocesas en la nueva literatura nacional by Carla Rodríguez González and Kirsten Matthews (review)

Scottish Women Writers in the New National Literature comprises ten chapters, five written by Carla Rodríguez, on Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Maud Saulter, Gerrie Fellows and Leila Aboulela, and five by Kirsten Matthews, on A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith, Carol Ann Duffy and Kathleen Jamie; the volume also contains an introduction by Margery Palmer McCulloch. It forms part of a series entitled English Studies Collection (Col·lecció Estudis Anglesos), published by the University Press of the Balearic Islands. The authors’ aim, in their own words, is to analyse the work of a selection of writers who have contributed to widening the cultural limits of the nation; in other words, what binds the chapters together is the artists’ capacity to start from a position within Scottish literature and move beyond, to explorations of key issues such as gender, sexuality, language, and post-colonialism. This book therefore has a well-defined agenda, and will obviously appeal more to readers who share similar beliefs than to those who do not. The preface emphasises the volume’s attempt to discuss and balance the work of Makars and those who live outside the parameters that cultural borders might enforce.

As McCulloch points out in the introduction, Liz Lochhead, when describing her early poetry, stated that ‘my country was woman’, and it would be fair to say that this is the foundation on which the volume is constructed. If there is a movement towards hybridity or the trans cultural, Lochhead is certainly the first and most powerful instigator of this process of opening up the abovementioned key issues, especially in the case of language. Mary, Queen of Scots, becomes, therefore, the emblematic figure where most ideological paths intersect, where the fault lines of nation are exposed and shown to be most shaky.

Each chapter begins with a succinct and informative account of the individual writer’s career, enhanced by a very deft use of information and ideas garnered from interviews. This is particularly useful for writers who are not so well known as Lochhead and Galloway, or for writers whose status as Scottish, particularly in the closing chapters, is open to debate. No one can doubt that accompanying the ideological thread is an unbounded and refreshing enthusiasm for contemporary Scottish literature; it is clear that Rodríguez and Matthews enjoy what they are doing, so hopefully this enthusiasm will rub off on their Spanish readers.

Each chapter has a similar structure: the informative section then leads on to an analysis of the writer’s work in relation to the theoretical questions the volume poses; in that sense, the volume is coherent with its proclaimed objectives. Understandably, this does not mean that each chapter is equally successful, so perhaps it is only right that I begin with the most convincing. The positioning of Lochhead is well argued, particularly in the suggestion that her success and acclaim gave women writers confidence that their voice could and would be heard. The chapter on Kathleen Jamie highlights the poet’s interest in ecology and philosophy, integrates an interesting discussion on Heidegger, as well as a brief, but perceptive discussion of poetical language. The chapters on Galloway, Duffy and Kennedy are also good, but the discussion of Smith is hampered, I suspect, due to a lack of appreciation of the novelist’s irony. All four chapters tend, at certain moments, to impose over the texts a rather uniform literary persona: luckily, the writers in question have more voices or a more varied voice than they are given credit for.

The most debatable issue is the volume’s use of theory, which at certain moments seems to me to be forced and at others not really tenable. As an illustration, in the chapter on Galloway’s Clara, Jacques Lacan makes a much earlier appearance than either Clara Wieck or Robert Schumann, and little is made of...