Prepare to embark on a captivating journey through the heart of Scotland in this thought-provoking and enlightening book. Join Richard Gault as he recounts his month-long walk from the southernmost tip of Scotland to Inverness, covering half the length of the country. More than just a travelogue, this book will inspire you to see the familiar in new ways, from the tiniest midge to the most majestic mountain. As Richard traverses the Scottish landscape, he uncovers a rich tapestry of history spanning two thousand years. He reveals Scotland as a land of saints, myths, and monsters; a land of heroes and villains; a land with surprising connections to distant countries. Through his journey, you’ll discover how Scotland played a pivotal role in shaping the modern world, even paving the way (quite literally, in one instance) for progress. By the end of this book, you’ll find yourself filled with a deeper appreciation for the past and a renewed sense of wonder for Scotland’s nature, people, and landscapes. But the journey doesn’t end there. Richard’s experiences will leave you pondering profound questions about the present and future, inviting you to reflect on your own relationship with the world around you. Informative, thought-provoking, and utterly engaging, this book is one you’ll find yourself recommending to friends time and time again. Step into Richard’s shoes and embark on an unforgettable journey through Scotland’s history, beauty, and soul.

This book offers an original interdisciplinary analysis of the relations between myth, identity and social reality, involving elements of narratology theory, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and social theory, harnessed to support an argument firmly located in the area of literary criticism. This analysis yields a fairly extensive reinterpretation of the concept of myth, which is applied to the examination of the relationship between narrative and social reality as represented in texts by contemporary Scottish and Irish women writers. The main theoretical sources are Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia, Jacques Derrida’s theories of citationality and Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivity. The analysis framework developed in the book uses these theories to create a new way of understanding how literary texts change readers’ worldviews by enticing them to accept alternative possibilities of cultural expression of identity and social order. The texts analysed in this book reconfigure naturalised stories that have become normative and constraining in conveying identities and visions of legitimate social orders. The book’s focus on feminine identities places it alongside feminist analyses of reconstructions of fairy tales, myths or canonical stories that establish what counts as legitimate feminine identity. Studied here for the first time together, the writers whose texts form the interest of this book continue the revisionist work begun by other women writers who engage with the male generated literary, philosophical and humanist tradition. They share a view of narratives as tools for continually negotiating our identities, social worlds and socialisation scenarios. While the high-level theoretical discourse of the first part of the book requires specialised knowledge, the second part of the book, offering close readings of the texts, is both lively and accessible and should engage the interest of the general reader and academic alike. This book is written for all those who are interested in the power words have to hold sway over our inner and outer (social) worlds.