Canonicity and National Identity: Let's put Scotland on the Map

Where is Scotland on the map of literary studies? This is a timely question for scholars to address. Recently, for example, some Scottish literature scholars have written a petition to the Modern Language Association to expand its current Scottish Literature Discussion Group into a Division on Scottish Literature at the MLA. The petition states that recent Scottish literary scholarship has " (a) recognised the wealth and distinctiveness of the Scottish literary tradition, and (b) sought to redress the anglo-centric bias of earlier treatments of Scottish writing… " (Corbett et al 1). The Discussion Group raises questions of literary scholarship that indirectly affect the entire canon; specifically, these scholars question the content of the canon and who builds that content. The literature of Early Modern England and Scotland is a fervent battleground for those who build the canon (textbook editors, classroom professors, and research professors), because the practical decisions they face are also political. As John Guillory notes in Cultural Capital: Literary culture in general, and the university in particular, are by no means structurally organized to express the consensus of a community; these social and institutional sites are complex hierarchies in which the position and privilege of judgment are objects of competitive struggles. (27) If a university must face internal socio-political decisions about including Scottish Renaissance literature in its curriculum, then that university is subject to considering the socio-political background of Renaissance Scotland. Such a background remains largely under-established;