This book probes an elusive, in-between moment in Scottish literature and cultural politics. Completed between 2018 and 2020, many of these essays are caught between established settlements (critical, cultural, political) and their surpassing. This is not only a Scottish condition, of course. Since the global financial crisis of 2007–8, Gramsci's over-used quip about ‘morbid symptoms’ has enjoyed a grim revival across the globe (Babic 2020). With the tottering of the liberal world order, billions feel a new resonance in his forecast that ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’. A brief symptomology of the past decade would include the swift rise and brutal collapse of the Arab Spring, escalating climate and refugee crises, the rise of mass hyper-surveillance, and galloping online conspiracism – both the cause and consequence of normalised ‘post-democracy’ and a splintered public episteme. Indeed, it becomes difficult to articulate any general pattern as fervent online groupings choose and define their own news, knowledge and reality. Since 2015 the rise of populist, nationalist and far-right politics has delivered Brexit, Trump and a fierce backlash against anti-racist, progressive or ‘woke’ identity politics.

So dramatic have been Scotland's internal political developments over the past decade, they are seldom related to these broader currents in a sustained way. This is not the occasion to attempt that synthesis, but if we return to Gramsci's prison note of 1930 we may note that he treats the zone of morbidity both as ‘crisis’ and ‘interregnum’: a moment of decision and calamity, but also the gap between distinct regimes. As this book attempts a provisional re-mapping of Scotland's post-devolution literary culture, the tension between these temporalities – suggesting change, stasis and exhaustion all at once – speak clearly to us in local accents. As critics we reach forward, stretching for the sharp edges of the new, while conscious that the unfinished business of the present is not finished with us yet.

The worn edges of an earlier ‘new’ – the ‘new Scotland’ promised by devolution – have grown familiar to our touch, shaping our coordinates in ways these essays seek to examine as well as refresh.