Namiętność in a Caledonian Metropolis: Scottish Urban Fiction and Its Cultures

The “city novel” was an essentially 19th-century phenomenon. By the time Scottish writers had belatedly addressed themselves to this genre, the Bildungsroman model of urban fiction (the transplanted “Young Man from the Provinces”) had given way to modernism and to a realism more magical than literal. This article discusses fictions which reflect Scotland’s ethnic mix and multiple identities, i.e. the country’s accommodation (or otherwise) of Irish, Jewish, Polish and Asian incomers: Patrick MacGill’s The Rat-Pit (1915), J. David Simons’s The Liberation of Celia Kahn (2011/2014), Suhayl Saadi’s The Burning Mirror (2001), and Fred Urquhart’s Jezebel’s Dust (1951).