Caroline McCracken-Flesher

No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. If this statement sounds extreme, it echoes the tone that criticism of Scott and his culture has taken through the twentieth century. Scott is supposed to have provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future--that pushed it "out of history." Scotland has become a place so absorbed in nostalgia that it could not construct a politics for a changing world. Possible Scotlands disagrees. It argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, also provided for a national future. They do not tell the story of a Scotland lost in time and lacking value. Instead they open up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. This book reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's nineteenth-century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Indeed, Scott invites readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. Scott's texts and his nation are alive in their constant retelling. Scott was an author for Scotland's new times.

Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow

Possible Scotlands

Jacob Neusner

Ernest S. Frerichs

Christians, Jews, "others" in Late Antiquity

"To See Ourselves as Others See Us"

Is Walter Scott to blame for the limitations of modern Scotland? The author argues that Scott used his position as an author to negotiate an identity for his homeland. The variety of Scott's tales suggest not a Scotland receding into the past, but one energetically alive in the past and future of its telling.

Scots like Iain N. Banks and Ken MacLeod lead in a futuristic tradition, for from MacDonald, Barrie, and Stevenson onwards, Scots have been speculating in ways derived from their unique circumstances lacking political power, they imagine future spaces and different places and151;with a twist. Nineteenth-century thermodynamics (theorized in Scotland), Celtic Otherworlds, and a Scotland always on the other side of history open unusual futures for Mitchison, Spark, Lindsay, Mitchell, MadDiarmid, Morgan, Crumey, Fitt, and Gray.

Scotland as Science Fiction

Vividly illustrated, The Doctor Dissected examines the the sensational serial killings--known as the Anatomy Murders--that roiled Scotland in the early nineteenth century and considers their checkered afterlife in novels, plays, and films.

A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders

The Doctor Dissected

Although Robert Louis Stevenson was a late Victorian, his work--especially Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--still circulates energetically and internationally among popular and academic audiences and among young and old. Admired by Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, Stevenson’s fiction crosses the boundaries of genre and challenges narrow definitions of the modern and the postmodern. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides an introduction to the writer's life, a survey of the criticism of his work, and a variety of resources for the instructor. In part 2, "Approaches," thirty essays address such topics as Stevenson's dialogue with James about literature; his verse for children; his Scottish heritage; his wanderlust; his work as gothic fiction, as science fiction, as detective fiction; his critique of imperialism in the South Seas; his usefulness in the creative writing classroom; and how he encourages expansive thinking across texts, times, places, and lives.

Caroline McCracken-Flesher

Books

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