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"Has Scotland suffered from colonial oppression by England for the last 300 years? While historiography may give an answer in the negative,
this study reveals that the contemporary Scottish novel is
haunted by strong feelings, marked by perceptions of abjection and
inferiorisation in response to constructing the English as dominating.
Drawing from an unprecedented corpus of contemporary Scottish
novels, this study explores the postcolonial in Scottish fiction in
order to investigate the underlying discursive power relations that
shape the Scottish literary imagination. The study consequently
demonstrates that the analysis of Scottish national identity profits
from this new angle of interpretation of the Scottish novel as postcolonial.
The analysis of discourses such as those of gender, class,
space and place, and race reveals how the construction of the Scottish
as marginalised permeates the width of the contemporary Scottish
novel, by referring to diverse examples, such as James Kelman’s
How late it was, how late or genre fiction such as Ian Rankin’s Set in
Darkness. Thus, this study provides an insightful reading in the wake
of current political developments such as the Scottish independence
referendum."
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