Douglas S. Mack: Scottish Fiction and the British Empire

• Silvia Mergenthal

Douglas Mack’s wide-ranging study of Scottish fiction from the eighteenth century to the present can be situated in the context of recent critical investigations into the applicability of post-colonial theoretical frameworks to the literature and culture of Scotland. These investigations, while acknowledging that post-Union Scotland was a junior partner in the British colonial enterprise and that many Scots both subscribed to the Imperial narrative of bringing the light of civilisation to primitive peoples in other continents, and made use of the economic opportunities offered by Imperial expansion, maintain that Scotland as a whole, and specific communities within it (the Highlands and the more remote parts of Lowland Scotland) were at the same time subject to processes of internal colonisation.

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