A tension runs through the Scottish-themed novels of Walter Scott (1771–1832), James Hogg (1770–1835) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), denaturalizing historical and political Scotland to recreate it fictionally, as a problematic construct constantly calling for new definitions, so as to find new meaning for it, or to reappropriate it as one's own. The representation of national interests is effected through the running theme of the various Jacobite rebellions during the eighteenth century and their not-so-immediate consequences, but history is subordinated to the literary and political stakes of the authors' present. W. Scott literarily posits the basis for a viable conciliation of the "Scottish self" with the rule of the British state. Hogg responds to this by looking for the source of an inexhaustible, evanescent and, primarily, fictional Scotland in a more distant past. Stevenson, as for him, inherits this quandary and ultimately chooses, in fiction as in real life, to escape and exile himself so as to live freely in a world detached of an all-too-heavy past.
