Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography

Book excerpt: This fascinating new study is about cultural change and continuities. At the core of the book are discrete literary studies of Scotland and Shakespeare, Walter Scott, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the modern Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and more recent cultural and literary phenomena. The central theme of literature and popular 'representation' recontextualises literary analysis in a broader, multi-faceted picture involving all the arts and the changing sense of what 'the popular' might be in a modern nation. New technologies alter forms of cultural production and the book charts a way through these forms, from oral poetry and song to the novel, and includes studies of paintings, classical music, socialist drama, TV, film and comic books. The international context for mass media cultural production is examined as the story of the intrinsic curiosity of the imagination and the intensely local aspect of Scotland's cultural self-representation unfolds.