Fictional Scotland: A “Realm of the Imagination” in Film Drama and Literature

This article examines the issues of media representation and cultural distinctiveness within Scotland, one of many national entities currently denied political and cultural expression at the sub–nation state level. Current output of Scotland’s television and film industries is compared with traditional and modern Scottish literature to see which themes and subjects have been preserved, how representative these themes are of Scotland, and whether they remain distinct from dominant English and American trends. The author argues that Scottish media output remains culturally and nationally distinctive in terms of recurring patterns in the selection of various themes and discourses. However, in the absence of a modern Scottish polity that could give political and cultural expression to the country, these themes, discourses, and patterns of use remain inherently regressive and mythic, placing Scottish cultural identity squarely in Scotland’s past rather than its present or its expectations of the future.