This thesis studies contemporary Scottish fiction by four writers Agnes Owens, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Warner, focusing on the problematic position of women characters and feminocentric texts within the dominant class and national(ist) discourses. It argues that the intimate interconstitution between Scottish masculine subjects and class/national politics alienates women from an active political subjectivisation, that the gender matrix of femininity/masculinity underlies the normative selection of which gendered subjects, and accordingly whose symbolic 'voice', can be perceived as 'historical' and 'political'. Scottish working-class men and the texts in which they are the central characters have been considered paradoxically as both a literary reflection of 'political defeatism', but also a form of 'subaltern' counter-politics to British neoliberalism and imperialism. This thesis points out that the common parameters of the debate on the possible (dis)continuation of both class and national(ist) discourses are masculinist, and as such women tend to be perceived as 'non-political' in this (re)politicisation of aesthetics. More fundamentally, these discourses are problematic for women's politicisation because they follow the rule of modern politics which assigns politicality on a fraternal basis, that political struggles are between men of different classes, nationalities and so on. The research interrogates this masculine-centrism in the dominant representational praxis which provides the discursive link between literature, politics, and history which (dis)places feminine subjects into a 'dehistoricised', 'depoliticised' space. It seeks to renegotiate the fraternal terms of this practice and to read feminine subjects and women-centred narratives as capable of conceptually illustrating emancipatory politics.

This dissertation examines the constructions of gender and national identity in four of Alan Warner's novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, and The Man Who Walks. I argue that Warner uses gender identity as the basis for the examination of a Scottish national identity. He uses the metaphor of the body to represent Scotland in devolution. His pregnant females are representative of "Scotland Expecting," a notion that suggests Scotland is expecting independence from England. I argue that this expectation also involves the search for a genuine Scottish identity that is not marred by the effects of colonization. Warner's male characters are emasculated and represent Scotland's mythological past. The Man Who Walks suggests that his female characters' pregnancies result in stillbirths. These stillbirths represent Scotland's inability to let go of the past in order to move towards a future independent nation.

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.