Taking Liberties: Scottish Literature and Expressions of Freedom

The notion of “freedom” has long been associated with a number of perceptions deemed fundamental to an understanding of Scotland and the Scots. Thus Scottish history is viewed, from resistance to the Roman Empire, to the Wars of Independence against England, to the eighteenth-century Jacobite uprisings, to the birth of the Labour and Trade Union movements. Key Scottish texts have the concept of liberty at their core: the Declaration of Arbroath, Barbour’s Brus, Blind Hary’s Wallace, the poems of Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid and the novels of Janice Galloway and Irvine Welsh. Scottish thinkers have written extensively on the philosophies of freedom, be it individual, economic, or religious. These essays examine the question of “freedom”, its representations and its interpretations within the literatures of Scotland.