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You Can't Get There From Here: Devolution and Scottish literary history
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Thomson, Alex |
| Copyright Year | 2008 |
| Abstract | Because devolution in Britain is an essentially ambiguous and contested process, it poses a challenge to anyone setting out to write critical, that is disinterested, history. In a review of Robert Crawford’s Devolving English Literature, James Chandler describes ‘devolution’ as ‘the term by which Scottish separatists name what they want to see happen to the legal-political entity “Great Britain”’: on this account devolution is the object of nationalist aspirations, the political expression of Scottish cultural autonomy.[1] However technically, as Vernon Bogdanor points out, devolution ‘provides for a parliament which is constitutionally subordinate to Westminster’; leaving intact the legitimacy of the British state, its value for a nationalist is that of a preliminary step on the way to a quite different political landscape.[2] Like the rhetoric of ‘new politics’ in Scotland, the very term ‘devolution’ can be seen as belonging historically to those parties which participated in the Constitutional Convention.[3] What is true of the word is also true of the series of events to which it is appended: its significance and meaning for the historian will depend on the narrative frame within which it is placed. Yet discussion of these complexities and ambiguities has been notable mostly for its absence in the study of contemporary literature, where something akin to a renationalization of literary history seems to be taking place, the most obvious symptom of which is the publication of the Oxford English Literary History under the editorship of Jonathan Bate, with the possibility of matching multi-volume Scottish, Irish and Welsh literary histories having been mooted by Oxford University Press. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 3 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue3/thomson.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
