Open AccessBritish Fictions after Devolution: William Boyd’s Culinary Arts
Author(s) -
Dougal McNeill
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
international review of scottish studies/international review of scottish studies.
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1923-5763
pISSN - 1923-5755
DOI - 10.21083/irss.v42i0.3622
Subject(s) - britishness , ideology , devolution (biology) , reading (process) , history , period (music) , literature , the arts , art , law , aesthetics , political science , visual arts , politics , archaeology , human evolution
Taking William Boyd's post-2000 novels as symptomatic of wider problems in British writing during the period of the break-up of Britain, this essay suggests that what looks, at first, like a simple collapse in Boyd's talent in fact has produced texts illuminating, in their limitations, the difficulties of British affiliation in the era of Britishness's ideological exhaustion. Boyd is, on this reading, an exemplary counter-example to the canon of self-consciously Scottish fiction more commonly studied in the years since 1979.