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This article analyses two contemporary novels, Mary Paulson-Ellis’The Other Mrs Walker(2016) and Ever Dundas’Goblin(2017), comparing their depictions of Edinburgh in their strikingly similar parallel narratives, in which a contemporary Edinburgh setting intertwines with that of London in the Second World War. In the context of the Brexit vote of 2016, in which arguments for British autonomy and border closure won the day, the article argues that these texts challenge the pro-Brexit discourse which employed the mythology of the Blitz spirit to undermine the backward-looking nostalgia of a specifically English nationalism. In contrast, the Scottish setting of Edinburgh is presented here as facilitating a turn to a future of more mobile narratives of interrelation and connectedness rather than the fixed dimensions of myth

This introduction to the Scottish Women’s Poetry special issue presents a brief overview of the current critical field, sets out the rationale behind the special issue as going some way to initiate a redressing of the critical neglect of twenty-first-century Scottish women poets, and addresses the significance of the terms of engagement before going on to introduce the essays. It argues for the special issue as a step toward encouraging greater critical engagement with Scottish women’s poetry and exploration of the diverse strands of practice in the field.

This essay traces a trajectory between the diminution of the radical objectives of second wave feminism and the rise of postfeminism in two contemporary novels by Scottish writers. Laura Hird's Born Free (1999) and Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2012) illustrate the shrinking of radical feminist ideals to a sexual revolution appropriated by the individualism, consumerism and competitive market-focused ideology which characterises neoliberal postfeminism and sustains misogynist social structures. Informed by critiques of postfeminism by commentators such as Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill, the essay finds Hird's end of century pessimistic vision of female defeat allayed to some extent in Fagan's gothic-tinged narrative of a marginalised outsider evading neo-patriarchal containment. The texts demonstrate a damaging disorientation in contemporary femininity produced by what McRobbie terms the postfeminist gender settlement.