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English Literature: [Only] two months before the election which brought to power a British government committed to devolution and the most significant Norquay_01_Intro 2 22/3/02, 9:30 am 3 Introduction constitutional changes to the British nation for three centuries, Homi Bhabha with the British Council presented a major conference-cumfestival called Reinventing Britain. Incredibly, the project contained nothing whatsoever about the devolution debate, or how the changing relationships between Scotland, England, Wales, not to mention Ireland, might contribute to
presume that with the devolution of power to a Scottish parliament and the clear possibility of independence, such attitudes no longer exist. But attitudes can lag behind political reality and from an attitudinal point of view the unthinkability of Scottish culture within a British context is alive and well. One question that must be considered is, how does one think about the unthinkable? Out of this paradox are born the stereotypes already referred to. The model of ‘Scotland as unthinkable’ is easy to find even in writing relating to contemporary art. An illuminating
_4_001.qxd 12 16/2/09 9:23 AM Page 12 Contexts International Commission on Decommissioning that they had received ‘no information from the IRA as to when decommissioning will start’,40 the power-sharing Executive was immediately faced with a huge crisis. After only seventy-two days of self-government, the province’s new institutions were suspended by the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Mandelson. On this occasion devolution was restored after a relatively brief period, following an undertaking from the Provisionals that they would ‘initiate a process’ to put their
-life discrimination and societal ostracism borne by ‘unwomanly’ women and gay men. In light of Scotland’s recently accomplished devolution, Whyte’s concern that Scottishness may now begin to undergo a hyperbolic reassertion of itself as a monologic master discourse at risk of Norquay_06_Ch5 96 22/3/02, 9:56 am 97 Masculinities and the post-nation recklessly shattering its erstwhile alliance with other, alternative counternarratives of the nation is surely to be taken very seriously. In conclusion, I would like to return to Kaja Silverman’s suggestion that men’s embrace of
from the First World. If anything, this has become more evidently the case with the 1990s resurgence of nationalist preoccupations in the west and in the former Second World (think only of devolution in the UK). Few would probably dispute the fact that nationalism remains a crucial force for liberation and justice especially in once-colonised countries. It is also true that the novels of these countries in particular will be concerned to configure the nation by way of organising (and often gendered) metaphors, if not strictly speaking as allegories in every case. For
inadequacy in his analysis or a staggering reversal of economic and cultural fortunes. As the decade closed with the establishment of a Welsh Assembly it might appear that Williams was simply wrong in pronouncing that with the 1979 anti-devolution vote, and the swing to Conservatives throughout almost all of Wales in the General Election of that year, the Welsh had identified themselves with southern England and ‘finally disappeared into Britain’ (1985: 305). The socialism forged in the inter-war years can still be found in the selfconfessed ‘classic labour’ (Maconie 1998
a disempowering dynamic with supposedly core cultures and enjoy the potential fluidity, that rapidity of change recognised by Doyle. As critics, we also need to produce more complicated and complicating navigational aids if we are to do justice to the reality of ‘waking up in a different place’. Notes 1 On Scotland’s post-devolution take-off see The Scotsman 17 January 2000. 2 For Scott’s citations from 1810, 1816, 1823 and 1827, see Williams 1968: 174, 190, 206, 231 and 428. 3 With regard to the Celtic chronotope, Joep Leerssen writes: ‘Once identified, the
that proceed from them. When I use the term ‘modernism’, it is to refer to the more or less radical movements in the arts, especially in literature, that were prominent from the turn of the twentieth century to the years immediately succeeding the First World War.5 Fragmenting modernism I ‘Modernism is not so much a revolution’, according to Herbert Read, writing in 1933, but is ‘rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic’.6 Later critics have followed this descriptive lead, identifying ‘not just change but crisis’ in
’. 59 In the light of the devolution of the sociopolitical and economic status of the Britons, this offers a particularly helpful model through which to understand the indigenous experience of the colonized wealhas . Ryan Craig and Victoria Davis argue that ‘the practices to bring Indigenous peoples into the fold of Whiteness’ (being sent to boarding schools, converted to Christianity, forced to switch from collective to individualized forms of land ownership) were in fact strategies for acquiring their land and resources
translation of Old English is imagined as a form of apolitical escapism from some of the cultural divisions of his own situation.’ 38 Though imaginary and fraught with contradictions, Heaney's perception of Old English – its ‘foundational’ status as well as its regional character in filtering through his poetic influences – is as generative as it is complex. Jones writes, ‘In constructing a poetic ancestry for himself that enlists both Old English and Hopkins, Heaney wishes to construct a poetics of devolution and