Community in Modern Scottish Literature ed. by Scott Lyall (review)

'Community has not only been a key thematic concern in Scottish literary representations […] it has also been a bulwark of the Scottish tradition, helping to form Scottish literature as a subject-area'. Volume 25 of Brill/Rodopi's SCROLL series unfolds from this proposition, and explores an admirably wide range of Scottish texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A strong editorial anchoring to this proposition holds the following chapters to this founding proposition extremely well, and the introduction itself provides an important overview.

After this there are a few historical sweeps, like H. Gustav Klaus's fascinating story of a body of popular but often half-forgotten inter-war working-class fiction, and a few single-author or single book studies, and some circling around themes, like Timothy C. Baker's interesting use of the island as a theoretical frame within which to track forward from the concerns of Iain Crichton Smith and George Mackay Brown. This mixture of historical, thematic, and textual/authorial frames is not a problem – all the chapters work their way round to ideas of community, and do so with some sophistication.

Amongst other contributions, Gill Tasker has an important chapter on an area underworked in literary histories, Alexander Trocchi's Scotto–French alliances with existentialism and Situationism. Scott Lyall's own subtle discussion is of the wounds and potentials of community, from MacDiarmid's take on kailyard and communism to Ewan Morrison's Tales from the Mall. Emma Dymock's chapter is a useful introduction to community in Gaelic poetry, Corey Gibson's is a theoretically and historically sharp discussion of Hamish Henderson, folklorism, and unnamed sources. Carole Jones offers a sophisticated discussion of queer communities as both a concrete existence and a direction of travel, and Bashabi Fraser looks at community in diasporic South Asian Scots. Always worth reading are Scott Hames – the latest instalment of his long-term explication of the work of James Kelman – and Alex Thomson – running through themes of alienation and community in Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing. And a nimble and fast-paced account of 2000s fiction by Monica Germanà adds to this contemporary stress. There is also some welcome engagement with the material conditions of community, as in Trish Reid's comprehensive discussion of definitions of community in Scottish drama, taking in the roles of Arts organisations.

There are a number of ways in which the insights here could be developed in future. For one thing, future additions could move beyond the disciplinary boundaries that bind us to phrases like 'critics think that … but the author refuses –', or 'using theory'. Also and relatedly, we could add some discussion of constitutional concretes, and how actual differences in national forms underpin community or individualism (and the Scottish Enlightenment and early Victorian imperial expansion would surely be important here). In what ways are emotional investments expected in what forms of political representation, and what does this leave behind? What is the relationship between community and the economy – or community and empire? There is also an odd absence of discussion of Britain, though it is probably the most important determining factor on what kinds of community can exist in Scotland. Indeed in some writers there is a nervousness about the term national itself, though the remit of the book seems to demand it – partly because of an association of nation – nationalist – masculinist (as in the 'hard man' narrative). We could also move beyond emphasising the lacks of identity stresses ('a stress on x means that critics have neglected y'), often played out in the lives of authors, a game that probably has more to do with British disciplinary demands than a search for Scottish collectives.

These are possible future directions opened up by this book, which is a smart and often fascinating step into a much-needed area of enquiry. Unsurprisingly for a collection including some of the most interesting and recognised writers on modern Scottish literature, it stands...