Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow

No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. This is a common assumption among countless commentators who read Scott as not having allowed his country any future. So well, it is thought, did Scott tell the story of a Scotland lost that he pushed the nation "out of history." Scotland became a place of nostalgic story so absorbed in the past that it lost its ability to guide its political future.

Possible Scotlands argues otherwise. It makes the case that the tales Scott told, although they were of a romanticized national past, also provided for a national future. They are not the story of a Scotland receding into its past, where national value is lost or past, but where it is always imaginable.

This work argues that Scott's various novels do not propagate a simple message, and his series of narrative personas and ambiguous endings mean that how readers should interpret both the texts and Scottish society remains indeterminate. This book argues that Scott did not imagine a restricted and backward Scotland that brooked no participation in the modern world.

Instead, elements of complexity and ambiguity in his modes of narration allow for myriad contemporary Scotlands, alive in the present and future of their telling.