Narrating Scotland traces the Scottish writer's weaving together of source material from memoirs, letters, histories, and records of trials. Barry Menikoff uncovers the documentary basis for reading Kidnapped and David Balfour as political allegories and reveals the skill with which Stevenson offered a narrative that British colonizers could enjoy without being offended by its underlying condemnation.

This book unravels the complexities of traditional storytelling and uses creative analytical techniques to uncover the meanings of the stories we tell. The reader is first acquainted with conceptualisations of how stories make meaning in our lives, then guided through a selection of stories from the rich traditions of Scotland’s Traveller and Nawken/Nacken communities. Beginning with a nuanced historical overview of the communities, Traveller Storytelling in Scotland: Folklore, Ideology and Cultural Identity then draws on archives, texts and interviews to introduce readers to the unique and vibrant folklore of Scotland’s Travellers and Nawken/Nacken. It connects ethnology and literary criticism to contextualise folklore and reveal how its ideological priorities underpin cultural identity. Utilising diverse analytical techniques, this book is a timely examination of a folkloric idiom that has, until now, been sorely in need of further scrutiny. It showcases the sophistication and enduring relevance of folkloric expressions to contemporary Scottish culture.

A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.

Britain's vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society – from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives – that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.

This Companion offers a compelling engagement with British fiction from the end of the Second World War to the present day. Since 1945, British literature has served to mirror profound social, geopolitical and environmental change. Written by a host of leading scholars, this volume explores the myriad cultural movements and literary genres that have affected the development of postwar British fiction, showing how writers have given voice to matters of racial, regional and sexual identity. Covering subjects from immigration and ecology to science and globalism, this Companion draws on the latest critical innovations to provide insights into the traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain, thus making it an essential resource for students and specialists alike.

List of members.

When three of Britain's best-loved and best-selling authors each publish at least two novels with a historical rebellion theme, there might be an interesting pattern worth examining. This is a long overdue study of the previously overlooked rebellion novel genre, with a close look at the works of Sir Walter Scott (Waverly and Rob Roy), Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge), and Robert Louis Stevenson (Kidnapped and The Young Chevalier). The linguistic and structural formulas that these novels share are presented, along with a comparative study of how these authors individualized the genre to adjust it to their needs. Scott, Dickens and Stevenson were led to the rebellion genre by direct radical interests. They used the tools of political literary propaganda to assist the poor, disenfranchised and peripheral people, with whom they identified and hoped to see free from oppression and poverty.