Introduction

‘Post-devolutionary’ covers a span of more than twenty years, and while its contemporaneity does not allow – as for all events and periods which are still unfolding before our eyes – for a fully detached and comprehensive view, it has lasted long enough to reveal a number of distinctive patterns and directions. It is worth pointing out by way of premise that such a label, widely used by critics and foregrounding an inextricable imbrication of the country's political and cultural lives, has taken centre stage in the Scottish literary debate for at least since the 1980s. As Scott Hames observes, ‘recent Scottish fiction and its critical reception are strongly conditioned by ongoing constitutional debate’ – an ‘inter-meshing’ that may be ‘occasionally stilted’, but that nonetheless ‘has much to do with our own historical moment’ (Hames 2017: n.p.). It is worthwhile to point out that like all ‘posts’ – from postmodern to postcolonial – even the ‘post’ in post-devolutionary is problematic and ambiguous. A ‘post’ signals a looking forward that is simultaneously a looking backward, it accounts for a shift of some kind that is nonetheless reluctant to let the past go – new but not quite (yet) really new. ‘Post-devolutionary’ indeed looks back at one of the most meaningful moments of Scotland's modern history – the return of the parliament at Holyrood – a moment that represents the achievement of a century-long political and cultural project, and that, for many, gestures forward to Scotland's political independence and the demise of the United Kingdom. The ‘forward’ side of the term – what lies beyond devolution – is however wrapped up in uncertainty, even more so today, after two consecutive deeply unsettling political events – the failed indyref of 2014 and the victory of Leave at the 2016 EU referendum – that have profoundly changed Scottish as well as British society, and whose full impact, at the time of writing this chapter, cannot yet be assessed.

By opting for the post-devolutionary label, rather than for a neutral century-based periodisation, the present chapter embraces the contradictions of a Janus-faced discourse, using it as a lens through which recent developments in Scottish writing can be fruitfully assessed.