This international conference aims to examine cultural diversity and prolixity in twenty-first century Scotland, as well as its changed relations to the UK and Europe in the wake of the Brexit referendum. If writers in the 1990s placed Scotland on the map, the new millennium ushered in a variety of works of fiction that contributed to the expansion of that map and to an integration of notions that shift the focus from the national to that of an examination of Scotland in a context that foregrounds the post-national and the cosmopolitan. In Scotland in Theory, Gavin Miller and Eleanor Bell describe the contemporary period as a ‘post-national age’. Bell, starting from the theoretical thinking of Richard Kearney, contends that a European identity is developing because of the way power is restructured at a European level, with the emergence of countries as super-nation-states, which are gradually prevailing over nation states. ‘This focus on the postnational’, she argues, ‘encourages a re-thinking of the traditional concept of ‘Scotland’’ (2005: 84). In Literature as Intervention, Jürgen Neubauer, opposing those he calls ‘the nationalist critics’, argues that the concept of national identity itself is problematic, as is the link established by critics between literature and national identity. He borrows instead Habermas’ concept of the ‘postnational constellation’ to show that with the collapse of national boundaries, there has been in European countries a move which he describes as transnational as well as local. This analysis, Neubauer insists, applies to both macro-economic issues and to culture and the arts: ‘Scottish writers are beginning to imagine life in postnational constellations in which interactions and relationships are both more local and more global than the nation’ (1999: 12). Berthold Schoene resorts to the concept of cosmopolitanism to describe this shift in recent Scottish literature:

Cosmopolitanism repudiates reductions of ‘society’ and ‘the public’ to what inhabits or evolves within a neatly staked-out homogeneous realm. […] In fact, cosmopolitanism’s greatest strength lies in defusing the undesirable side-effects of globalisation by working to deconstruct neo-imperial hegemonies, champion transnational partnership, and project the world as a network of interdependencies. (Schoene 2008: 75-6)