Possible Scotlands Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorro [Hardcover]

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 Scotlandsdisagrees. 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.

A commendably brave, interventionist book. --Gerard Carruthers,Scotia

An excellent study. --Alison Lumsden,Studies in Hogg and His World

InPossible Scotlands, Caroline McCraken-Flesher puts a bold new post-devolution spin on the literary and cultural relationship of national ideas, and offers a strong defense, both national and densely theoretical, of the figure who most troubles this relationship, Walter Scott. --Judith Wilt,Studies in Romanticism

McCracken-Flesher opposes any unified or developmental view of Scott's career, attending instead to the ways in which each novel reconsiders the challenge of narrating a nation so as to continually undo any statil³