Review: Debatable Fictions: Scottish Cinema, Television and the Novel

Abstract

Duncan Petrie's Contemporary Scottish Fictions largely succeeds in examining the novel, film and television drama in Scotland since 1980. He considers these three pervasive forms of art and entertainment as very much inter-related, and linked in significant ways to social and political developments in the context of devolution. Displaying in his approach something of George Davies's 'democratic intellect' at its best, Petrie describes his principal aim as follows: 'This book will explore the Scottish cultural renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s by focussing primarily on the novel, cinema and television drama', adding that '(t)hese are all narrativebased popular forms that provide the means by which the myths and realities, experiences and dreams of Scotland and its inhabitants have been reflected and asserted, imagined and re-imagined through a process of cultural transmission dating back to the bardic tradition of oral story-telling' (p.l).