ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Anglicizing pressures on Scottish writers, revealing how those pressures positioned them to play an outsized role in institutionalizing the standard English language and literary canon that would underwrite the idea of a culturally unified Great Britain. The tying of national identity to language and literary tradition, however, had far-reaching and multivalent effects: Scots Gaelic writers appropriated those connections for their own resistant politics; Lowlands Scots writers cagily undermined both notions of a singular language and literary tradition and the very idea of the “local” that a supposedly general, nationalizing English both helped create and was pitched against.
