The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature

There is an arguable cultural tipping‐point for recent years in Scotland and it has been political devolution, that transition, allegedly, from subalternity and mere‐postcolonial status to a greater and fuller awareness of individual and national identity in and for itself. Politicians might be good or bad at expressing and achieving this, but writers (novelists, poets, dramatists, critics, translators, English‐ and Scots‐ and Gaelic‐speakers alike) can do it better.

This is where the Companion enters the fray, after devolution (in 1999), perhaps with a fair or foul wind on the way towards full independence, and where Scottish writers fit into it...