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, and their own character, and the character of their countrymen, in the eyes of the world? It was but a week, since an aged grey-haired man, a lasting honour to the land that gave him birth, who has done good service to his country, as his forefathers did, and who will be remembered scores upon scores of years after the worms bred in its corruption, are but so many grains of dust – it was but a week since this old man had stood for days upon his trial before this very body, charged with having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic, which has for its accursed
3 Strangers in a strange land?: the new Irish multicultural fiction Amanda Tucker In his seminal essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’, Salman Rushdie describes how, at a conference on modern writing, novelists struggled to articulate the purpose of their artform. After these (unnamed) fiction writers outlined the need for ‘new ways of describing the world’, another participant suggested that this objective might be limited. Rushdie argues that description is in fact political and, moreover, that ‘redescribing the world is the necessary first step in changing it’ (Rushdie
and Guattari, language use never offers. Inferiorisation of the non-standard is achieved, unless the categorisation process itself is invalidated. Kelman abrogates the categorisation process of language and of nationality to the point of becoming a hybridising supranationalist. Any lingering critical tussles over the authenticity of Kelman’s masculine Glaswegianess are made utterly irrelevant by the last two novels’ supranationality. In these last two novels, Translated Accounts (2001) and You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free
Any discussion of sheep and their representation in contemporary Scottish poetry is overshadowed by the history of the clearance of highlanders from their crofts to make way for the ‘great sheep’. The story of the Highland Clearances is well covered elsewhere, for example by T. M. Devine ( 2018 ), but the cruelty and injustices associated with the movement of peasant farmers from their land is still keenly felt in Highland communities. The highly political play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil ( 1974 ) uses the Cheviot breed of