Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-Histories: Stephanie Lehner London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Following in the footsteps of Irish Studies, over the last two decades a number of attempts have been made at linking Scottish literature with postcolonial theory. Often, however, these applications have been viewed with scepticism: can Scottish literature really be thought of as postcolonial? Is this this really an appropriate way of thinking about Scottish culture? Such have been the recurring responses. As Michael Gardiner writes in his recent introduction to Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives, ‘there has always been a suspicion within postcolonial studies that the complicity of individual Scots in empire has made the connection [with postcolonialism] invalid “at source”’.1 Nonetheless, there have been a series of significant interventions in Scottish postcolonialism since the late 1980s which have opened out the critical potential of the term – from early interventions by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull (1989), Roderick Watson’s engagements with Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and representation of voice (1996 and 2006) as well as often-cited articles by Berthold Schoene (1995) and Michael Gardiner (1996). Alongside these, however, have been a host of other voices cautioning careful usage of the term, including Liam Connell (2003) and Scott Hames (2007).2 It is out of this critical trajectory that Stephanie Lehner’s book emerges.