Cairns Craig > Quotes

“Scotland had no need of a 'resistant nationalism' precisely because it was an imperial nation engaged in projecting its national culture to the world. The historical problem of Scotland's 'absent nationalism' in the nineteenth century is a non-problem because far from lacking a nationalism, Scottish nationalism was vigorously engaged on imposing itself wherever Scots had achieved a determining or a significant role within the territory of the British Empire. Scottish nationalism did not need to assert itself within the British state because the 'world was its field', and its aim was to make Scotland the spiritual core of the imperial project.”
― Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence

“England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales might have been partners in an imperial project that required the projection of 'English Literature' as one of the defining elements of cultural superiority that justified the continuous extension of Empire throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also engaged in an internal struggle over the origins and the dynamics of that literature, and about the role of their national literatures within the consolidating discipline of English.”
― Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence

“The attempt to separate Lowland from Highland Scotland ignores the extent to which Lowland Scots are the descendants of Highlanders, and how many Lowland Scots, like Nan Shepherd, made the country's mountains the focus of their spiritual aspirations. 'Highlandism' is not simply the ersatz adoption of a stereotypical version of Scottish culture which is entirely unconnected with the reality of modern Scottish life: the Highlands are both the geographical and the historical backdrop with which 'Lowland' Scottish culture interacts.”
― Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence

“Scott and Terry created a political theatre in which a Hanovarian English monarch could appear on the stage of Edinburgh to act the part of a Stuart king.”
― Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence

“If nations are founded not in unity but in exchange, both exchange within a national territory whose boundaries are largely arbitrary, and exchange with cultures that are other to them in time and space, then those bugbears of Scottish cultural history - Lowland Scotland's adoption of the iconography of a Highland Celtic identity and the country's increasing 'Anglicisation' - can be read not as the signs of failed nationhood but as evidence of a nation which has grasped that its real resources are generated by its capacity for cultural export, translation and assimilation.”
― Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment

“As the origin of the discipline of geology, and as one of the oldest landmasses on earth, Scotland is emblematic of the ancient forces by which the earth has been shaped long before the advent of humanity and its belief in the progress of history.”
― Cairns Craig, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

“What happened in Scotland in the 1960s and the 1970s and what laid the foundation for the enormous creative achievements of the 1980s was the liberation of the voice. The Scottish voice declared its independence. The liberation of the voice was at first the acceptance of and an assertion of the vernacular. But the real liberation of the voice came not from the assertion of the rights of the vernacular itself, but from the assertion of the right to move without boundaries between the vernacular and standard English, between the demotic and the literary.”
― Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture