After Cosmopolitanism: Imagining the Stranger in Contemporary Scottish Literature

This article discusses how contemporary Scottish literature often unsettles the binary logic of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. It provides a historical/theoretical premise on how and why such questioning of this deeply-ingrained binary is a much needed turn. Arguing for an ‘ethics of strangers’, the article then focuses on a number of texts, grouped around three constructions of the stranger: the stranger as outsider, the familiar stranger, the stranger caught between homes.