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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
Caroline McCracken-Flesher. Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 240. $60.00 cloth.
Nineteenth century studies have long been interested in the Irish dynamic within the construction of "Britishness," but the last two decades have also seen a significant new interest in the Scottish one. Ireland was certainly a tradition, an idea, a song, a people, but Scotland, as cultural critic Tom Nairns points out, had been these--and also a nation-state--for far too long to cease being one in 1707 just because its king had assimilated to England and its representatives agreed to union (After Britain [2000], 96). The resulting marginalization, evacuation, subordination, may have left a legacy of self-rupture and mutual recrimination, comments Craig Cairns, Scots addicted to blaming everything and everyone for the gap between "our failed national self" and "our personal idea of the possible Scot" (Out of History [1996], 13). But the (apparent) absence of an actual Scot, or Scotland, might on the other hand have generated a stronger set of possible Scotlands during its immersion in "Britain": the "play" of the necessarily imagined nation becoming part of its hidden reality, the clumsy actuality of the construction "Britain" becoming Britain's Achilles heel.
In Possible Scotlands, Caroline McCracken-Flesher puts a bold new post-devolution spin on the literary and cultural relationship of these national ideas, and offers a strong defense, both national and densely theoretical, of the figure who most troubles this relationship, Walter Scott.
In...
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