Narrating Devolution: Politics and/as Scottish Fiction

Abstract

This article explores the tensions between the competing cultural and political narratives of devolution, anchored around James Robertson’s state- of-the-nation novel And the Land Lay Still (2010). The article emerges from the two-year research project ‘Narrating Scottish Devolution’, and includes excerpts from workshops held on this topic at the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies, alongside archival work on the internal debates of the Royal Commission on the Constitution (1969–73). The article unpicks competing teleologies of government de-centralisation and the recovery of Scottish cultural agency, ending with a call to begin the thorny task of narrativising devolution in political and historical terms.

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