Narrating Devolution: Politics and/as Scottish Fiction

Citation

Hames S (2017) Narrating Devolution: Politics and/as Scottish Fiction. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings, 5 (2), Art. No.: 2. https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.20

Abstract
This article explores the tensions between the competing cultural andpolitical narratives of devolution, anchored around James Robertson’s state- of-the-nation novelAnd the Land Lay Still(2010). The article emergesfrom the two-year research project ‘Narrating Scottish Devolution’, and includes excerpts from workshops held on this topic at the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies, alongside archival work on the internal debates of the Royal Commission on the Constitution (1969–73). The article unpicks competing teleologies of government de-centralisation and the recovery of Scottish cultural agency, ending with a call to begin the thorny task ofnarrativising devolution in political and historical terms. Access the podcast at: http://hdl.handle.net/11667/77

Keywords
Scottish Literature; Devolution; James Robertson; historical novel; UK politics

Notes
The article reports the findings of a research project ('Narrating Scottish Devolution: Literature, Politics and the Culturalist Paradigm’) supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (ref SG132334).

Journal
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings: Volume 5, Issue 2

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