---

Contemporary Scottish fiction is vigorous, vivid and diverse, eschewing the straitjackets of genre and resisting categorisation as either ‘mainstream’ or ‘literary’. Meanwhile, Scotland itself refuses to conform to external notions of what it is, and what it can become. The literature of this post-devolution nation comes in a multitude of voices.

The Space of Fiction investigates how Scottish writers have responded to, and been affected by, the nation’s ongoing political discourse. Examining in detail the works of Des Dillon, Anne Donovan, Michel Faber, Laura Hird, Alison Miller, Ewan Morrison, James Robertson, Suhayl Saadi, Zoë Strachan and their contemporaries, The Space of Fiction traces their multifarious approaches to a post-national, cosmopolitan, multicultural and even globalised Scotland, and explores their notions of space, of place, and of the impact of fiction on the nature of identity.

Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon is a professor of contemporary British literature at Aix-Marseille University, France, and specialises in Scottish literature. She has published Alasdair Gray: Marges et effets des miroirs, along with several articles and book chapters on Scottish literature from the 1980s to the present.

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction

1. Millennium Babes: Female Urban Voices after James Kelman and Irvine Welsh: Laura Hird, Anne Donovan, Zoë Strachan and Alison Miller
2. Female Crime Fiction: The Space of Transgression
3. James Robertson: The Contagion of History
4. Suhayl Saadi: The Third Space of Fiction
5. Ewan Morrison: The Non-Place of Fiction
6. The Confines of the Human: Shorter Fiction by Michel Faber, Des Dillon, Suhayl Saadi, Ewan Morrison and Scotland Into The New Era
7. Conclusion

• Bibliography
• List of abbreviations
• Index