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The field of Irish-Scottish studies has been gaining prominence at roughly the same time as postcolonial studies, namely since the 1970s: a period marked globally by growing transnational movements of capital, labour as well as culture. Traditionally, Ireland and Scotland have been perceived only through quasi-colonial lenses, that is, with their relationship refracted and distorted in the light of their dominant neighbour, England. This has prevented possibilities to establish a meaningful dialogue between them, as Willy Maley contends (2000: 205): "It is precisely because of their different but related involvements with England that each [nation] has resisted comparison with the other. Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Scottish hyphens conceal an Irish-Scottish interface, with literature as a crossover." As with Maley, several proponents of a Scottish–Irish comparison assert that this derives from defining each country only as the binary other to England. This is, for example, apparent when Declan Kiberd ponders in Inventing Ireland (1996: 1, 9) who invented the isle: asserting in orientalist mode the constitutive "help" of "the English", he infers that "Ireland was soon patented as not-England, a place whose peoples were… the very antithesis of their new rulers from overseas' (see also Said 1995). As a result, and to the regret of Cairns Craig (2005: 48), he neglects to acknowledge the impact of Scotland's cultural exports, such as James Macpherson's "translations' of the Ossianic poems, for instance, on what I call Ireland's cultural imagiNation.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230308794_2

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