Before you leave...
Take 20% off your first order
20% off
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order
Discover summer reading lists for all ages & interests!
Find Your Next Read

The Wealth of the Nation explores how Scotland has continued to assert its distinctive cultural difference despite the three-hundred-year union with England and the modern forces of globalisation. Dealing with Scotland since the eighteenth century, the study analyses how Scottish culture defined itself within the British Empire and how, in the late twentieth century, it recovered from the collapse of the Empire to rebuild the value of its cultural past. Through its focus on the role of memory in philosophy, literature and the visual arts, readers will gain understanding of the influence that modern Scottish writers and artists have had on contemporary Scottish nationalism. The book argues that political nationalism in modern Scotland is founded on a cultural revival that began in the 1950s and 60s but gained momentum from resistance to the outcome of the 1979 devolution referendum. That resistance, and the creative achievements which it generated, provoked a re-examination of the nation's cultural history, revealing a wealth previously denied or forgotten.
Cairns Craig is Glucksman Professor Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen and previously Professor of Modern and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He was the general editor of the four volume History of Scottish Literature published in 1987 by Aberdeen University Press. He has written extensively on modern poetry, on the history of Scottish culture and on the novel in Scotland. His monographs include Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1981), The Modern Scottish Novel (1999), Intending Scotland (2009), The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (2018) and Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death (2018). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy.
Thanks for subscribing!
This email has been registered!
Take 20% off your first order
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order