The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies

Book excerpt: The last two decades have seen a new renaissance in Scottish literary culture in which the Scottish novel has attained new heights of maturity, confidence and challenge. The Scottish Novel since the Seventies is the first major critical reassessment of the developments in this period. Ranging from the work of longer-established authors such as Robin Jenkins, Muriel Spark and William McIlvanney to the more recent experiments of Alasdair Gray James Kelman and Janice Galloway, it provides a new critical focus on the intriguing relationship between continuity and innovation which characterises the novel's response to the complex changes in Scottish culture and society during the past twenty years. The contributors assess the work of an extensive number of writers in thecontext of a correspondingly wide range of issues: gender, postmodernism, political identity, archaism and myth, and the theme of disintegration.There are also chapters on the continuing growth of the 'Glasgow novel' and film adaptations of Scottish fiction. A bibliography of Scottish fiction since 1970 completes this critical account.