Between Nationhood and Nonconformity
It tends to be assumed that the Anglo-Scottish relationship has defined modern Scottish literature. This chapter contends that religion rather than nationhood has been the dominant feature of Scottish literature within the Union, and that for most Scots, certainly from the mid-eighteenth-century Secessions, by way of the Disruption (1843), to the reunion of the Church of Scotland with the United Free Church in 1929, denominational allegiances within Scottish Protestantism, often within Presbyterianism itself, were the principal vehicles of identity. Scotland had a rich periodical press during the nineteenth century, but one splintered along denominational lines. Every denomination had its magazine, and Scottish reviewing, and literature more generally, bore marked denominational inflections. Moreover, the vivid characterization, claustrophobic Calvinism, and ingenious plotting of the Whig-Presbyterian novel have continued in no small measure—in works by Robin Jenkins and, more recently, James Robertson—to provide a narrative template for secularized, postmodern Scottish literature.