Abstract
<div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"> <span>This article builds on Jones’s previous work on masculinity in Scottish fiction, probing the ongoing process of moving beyond dominant paradigms of masculinity in Scottish writing. The analysis explores the haunting power of masculine spectres and their return to centrality in twenty-first century Scottish fiction. The article juxtaposes Emily Mackie’s novels </span><span><em>And </em></span><em>This is True</em> (2010) and <em>In Search of Solace </em>(2014), which both remain fixated upon masculinity with Ali Smith’s <em>There but for </em><em>the</em> (2011), which resists the urge to re-centre masculinity despite its central male character, and offers a contrasting alternative to dominant modes of male identity. </div></div></div>
Highlights
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The analysis explores the haunting power of masculine spectres and their return to centrality in twenty-first century Scottish fiction
In previous work I identified a trend in a strand of devolutionary Scottish fiction, by both female and male writers, for male characters to ‘disappear’; that they were ‘wishing and attempting to vanish or be rid of themselves, dying or already dead’ (Jones 2009, 1)
Summary
This article builds on Jones’s previous work on masculinity in Scottish fiction, probing the ongoing process of moving beyond dominant paradigms of masculinity in Scottish writing. Mo said diverges from this model in having a female central character, so it is her partner Mo who is the agent of the title, it is Helen’s experience of life we are tuned into It is her long-estranged brother Brian who is the spectral presence here; she thinks she recognises him in the figure of a homeless man who, with his companion, crosses in front of her taxi on her way home from work one night. Mackie’s fiction is enthralled by masculinity and its contemporary journey through the battlefields of identity politics Both novels prioritise male experience, though in different ways, and in this they provide topical examples of a restaging of dominant masculinity at the centre of focus, returned from the margins of discredited authority. The fact that both Nevis and Jacob are writers underscores the depiction of a selfconscious re-assertion of masculine control, here over the discursive realm, when faced with the threat of overpowering relationality engendered by women
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