Regionalism is an almost all-embracing category in relation to the Scottish novel: simply by virtue of being Scottish, almost all Scottish novels will be identified as regional within the traditions of the English novel, rather than representing an alternative national tradition. And because ‘Scottishness’ has been identified primarily with lower-class or working-class Scots (middle-class Scots being those who have been ‘anglified’), Scottish novels will almost inevitably fulfill the key features of the regional novel as identified by Keith Snell in his Introduction to this volume – locale, dialect and a primarily lower class community. There is, however, an equally insistent regionalism within the borders of Scotland itself. Scottish novelists may construct their narratives as paradigms of a national consciousness, but they generally do so by locating their narrative within strictly demarcated regional boundaries, and as a consequence almost all the major Scottish novelists are identified with specific areas of Scotland – whether it is John Galt and George Douglas Brown with Ayrshire, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Nan Shepherd with the Mearns, Neil Gunn with Sutherland and Caithness, George Mackay Brown with Orkney, or James Kelman with Glasgow.