The Scottish Network Novel

While critical celebrations of the stylistic and thematic diversity of contemporary Scottish fiction are commonplace, few critics have attended to the implications of that diversity for formal analysis, and for a broader understanding of Scottish literature itself. This article establishes a model of the Scottish network novel, which provides an opportunity to reconsider the relations between essentialist and open-ended critical approaches, and to place a diverse set of texts in relation and generate new insights. Following a survey of the current critical field, the article introduces its model through examples from well-known texts by Jackie Kay, James Kelman, and Ali Smith, before turning to case studies featuring works by Leila Aboulela, Douglas Bruton, Linda Cracknell, David Keenan, Jon McGregor, and Maggie O’Farrell. By emphasising the importance of multivocal narration and nonlinear temporality in these texts, as well as a focus on everyday labour and repetition, the article suggests that networks are both a dominant theme and structure within the novels themselves, and provide a transformative way to consider them together without being limited by pre-existing formulations of ‘Scottishness’.