Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T02:20:43.838Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Self and Nation: Issues of Identity in Modern Scottish Drama by Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Adrienne Scullion
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The creation of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999, argues Adrienne Scullion, has the potential to change everything that has been understood and imagined or thought and speculated about Scotland. The devolved parliament shifts the governance of the country, resets financial provisions and socio-economic management, recreates Scottish politics and Scottish society – and affects how Scotland is represented and imagined by artists of all kinds. The radical context of devolution should also afford Scottish criticism an unprecedented opportunity to rethink its more rigid paradigms and structures. Specifically, this article questions what impact political devolution might have on the rhetoric of Scottish cultural criticism by paralleling feminist analysis of three plays by women premiered in Scotland in 2000 with the flexible, even hybrid, model of the nation afford by devolution, resetting identity within Scottish culture as much less predictable and much more inclusive than has previously been understood. An earlier versions was delivered by the author on 5 March 2001 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in receipt of the biennial RSE/BP Prize Lectureship in the Humanities. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where she is also the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , November 2001 , pp. 373 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Rise of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1990).Google Scholar
Bechhofer, Frank, McCrone, David, Kiely, Richard, and Stewart, Robert, ‘Constructing National Identities: Arts and Landed Elites in Scotland’, Sociology, XXXIII, No. 3 (1999), p. 515–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beveridge, Craig and Turnbull, Ronald, Scotland after Enlightenment: Image and Tradition in Modern Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1997).Google Scholar
Beveridge, Craig, The Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989).Google Scholar
Christianson, Aileen and Lumsden, Alison, ed., Contemporary Scottish Women Writers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Cohen, Robin, Frontiers of Identity: the British and Others (London: Longman, 1994).Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford, ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’, Old Societies and New States: the Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. , Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 107–113.Google Scholar
Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Black-well, 1983).Google Scholar
Glover, Sue, Shetland Saga (London: Nick Hern, 2000).Google Scholar
Glover, Sue, Bondagers and The Straw Chair (London: Methuen, 1997).Google Scholar
Guibernau, Monserrat, Nations without States: Political Communities, in a Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart and Gay, Paul de, ed., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996).Google Scholar
Harris, Zinnie, Further than the Furthest Thing (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrower, David and Greig, David, ‘Why a New Scot-land Must Have a Properly Funded Theatre’, The Scotsman 25 11 1997, p. 15.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, John and Smith, Anthony D., ed., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996).Google Scholar
McArthur, Colin, ed., Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1982).Google Scholar
McCartney, Nicola, Home (typescript, 2000).Google Scholar
McCartney, Nicola, Heritage (Edinburgh: Traverse, 1998).Google Scholar
McCrone, David, The Sociology of Nationalism (London; New York: Routledge, 1998).Google Scholar
McCrone, David, Understanding Scotland: the Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar
McCrone, David, Kendrick, Stephen, and Straw, Pat, ed., The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
McDonald, Jan, ‘Scottish Women Dramatists since 1945’, A History of Scottish Women's Writing, ed. Gifford, Douglas, McMillan, Dorothy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 494–513.Google Scholar
Meech, Peter and Kilborn, Richard, ‘Media and Identity in a Stateless Nation: the Case of Scotland’, Media, Culture and Society, XIV, No. 2 (1992), p. 245–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nairn, Tom, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: Verso, second ed., 1981).Google Scholar
Pittock, Murray G. H., Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Scullion, Adrienne, ‘Contemporary Scottish Women Playwrights’, The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, ed. Reinelt, Janelle, Aston, Elaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 94–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scullion, Adrienne, ‘Feminine Pleasures and Masculine Indignities: Gender and Community in Scottish Drama’, Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature, ed. Whyte, Christopher (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 169–204.Google Scholar
Sillars, Jane, ‘Drama, Devolution and Dominant Representations’, The Media in Britain: Current Debates and Developments, ed. Stokes, Jane, Reading, Anna (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 246–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Anthony D, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony D, ‘The Myth of the “Modern Nation” and the Myth of Nation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, I, No. 1 (1988), p. 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar