Professor Robert Crawford of the University of St. Andrews is a poet, literary critic, and historian of some renown. He has written extensively on Scottish literature from Enlightenment Scotland, including an award-winning biography of Scotland's national bard, Robert Burns. He is therefore extremely well placed to discuss the relationship between literary imagination and nationalism. He does this through an exploration of the significance that the Battle of Bannockburn of 1314 has had for over seven centuries on the national consciousness, from medieval poets such as Blind Harry, to Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and, finally Hugh McDiarmid and more recent writers, such as Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan, and James Robertson. While admiring the knowledge and scholarship involved in such a project, one cannot help feeling that 280 pages can hardly do justice to such an important topic, although Crawford tries manfully in this respect.

Crawford clearly demonstrates the protean nature of Bannockburn as both event and symbol as well as the interpretive malleability of the battle that allowed its story to be appropriated over time by both Nationalists and Unionists alike. Through the depiction by both Scottish and English writers of Bruce and Wallace as opponents of tyranny and defenders of freedom it was as easy to cast their struggle within a Whiggish version of the progressive growth of democracy and democratic institutions as it was to see them as heroic upholders of Scotland's right to be an independent nation free from English domination. After the Union of Crowns in 1603, Patrick Gordon, in his poem Famous Historie of the Renouned and Valiant Prince Robert surnamed the Bruce (1615), written to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Bannockburn, sees the Scottish victory as less a defeat for English imperial ambitions and more “as offering a pattern of glorious conduct and countering the anti-Englishness of earlier Scottish historians” (51) like George Buchanan. As the battle became a work of fiction, the story became embellished with all sorts of Unionist gloss.

However, no matter how exciting and inspiring the story of the struggles for Scottish independence was for a later readership, particularly in England, there was no way of forgetting that its literary tropes of freedom and liberty posed a threat to the Union of 1707 as it reminded those who engage with the narrative that Scotland was formerly a free and independent nation. Also, the struggle was inspirational to those radicals in the 1790s who were trying to democratize the British state. At their trial for high treason in 1794, Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke spoke of the cause of freedom that “Wallace bled” for (88). Bannockburn—and the memories it still had the power to provoke—was politically incendiary.

This was negated by the increasing acceptance of the eighteenth-century Scottish literati who condescendingly emphasized the courage and the heroic stature of Bruce and Wallace but argued that they belonged to a past marked by violence, sectarianism, and lawlessness in contrast to the rational and polite society that had developed since the incorporating union of 1707. Many lowlanders in Scotland had grown rich on the back of the empire and the Industrial Revolution, and they had no wish to emphasize their Scottish identity in opposition to Britishness. The nineteenth century saw the expansion of empire and the extensions of the franchise further embedding Scotland into the Union. Most Scots were content with the dual identity of British/Scottish and that was reflected in the work of Walter Scott who arguably more than any other writer of this period did most to create that sense of Britishness. This sense of identity contentment is reflected in the jaw-dropping chronological jump made by Crawford in his narrative, which moves from Scott to McDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance of the interwar period.

This period sees nationalism bound up with the kind of Celtic communism espoused by McDiarmid but in a form that produces a series of irreconcilable political contradictions. McDiarmid is preaching a political creed that involves the international working class making a new classless society and yet he is vehemently anti-English to the point that he can stand accused of racism and misogyny. His Scotland is a masculine one. More modern writers, such as Gray and Lochhead and Robertson, have moved toward a more inclusive form of nationalism and they are the subject of a series of case studies invoking the relationship between nationalism and the literary imagination, although it all seems a little tacked on.

This book is written from an unashamed nationalist point of view. There is nothing wrong with this. It is no sin to write with passion and commitment but it is too engaged, too one-sided for the historian. The writers are cherry-picked to fit a narrative that excludes as much as it includes. The demand for a union between Scotland and England has a very long history and is as powerful a story as that of Bannockburn. But these voices are silent even in the modern era were important, and popular writers such as Ian Rankin, Andrew O'Hagan, and others are omitted from the discussion. As a polemic Bannockburns works, but as a work of history it is a failure. Even a non-literary critic such as the reviewer might balk at some of the judgments of Crawford. For example, he reads King Lear reductively as a Unionist play, which apparently conveys the message that we are better together (see page 45 in the text, despite the index referencing page 43). Nevertheless, although it is hugely biased it remains a though-provoking book, beautifully written, and accessible to a wider audience than those inside the academy.