Breaking Free and Yearning Back: The Timelessness of Scottish Literature

Abstract

In recent decades, it has been much more widely acknowledged than before that Scottish literature has to date retained a distinctive character which permits or even demands its study as a tradition in its own right, distinct if not entirely separate from the literary tradition of England. This paper presents evidence for the paradoxical argument that the particular distinctiveness of Scottish literature after 1707 may be said to exist both in spite and because of Scotland's loss of political independence in the Union of Crowns, being an event after which representations of time and temporality in Scottish imaginative writing assumed a special character. It is argued that this literary development was one of the consequences of Scotland's extinction as a separate political entity, and of the ideological transformation of a country whose physical and geographical shape remained, into an ostensibly history-free zone. In pursuit of the argument, a brief diachronic sketch is followed by the analysis of selected literary works expressing that specifically Scottish time perception which has contributed to the particular features of post-l 707 Scottish literature to the present. Ultimately, it is suggested that the persistence of certain time-related motifs, topoi, or modes beyond the present day could be seen as an important parameter for the success or failure of recent and contemporary political efforts to bring Scotland back as an equal agent on that historical stage where the past of nations interacts with their future..