What is Scotland? How does a nation take shape on paper, and who gets to decide which aspects will take hold in the cultural imagination? In this module we will explore the ways in which Scotland as a location and an idea has been constructed and represented in literature from premodern contexts to the present day, at home and abroad, in prose, poetry and drama, as well as how we ourselves might participate in the project of “writing Scotland”. Beginning with three weeks on Scottish writing about what it means to live in and identify with Scotland from a variety of perspectives, we’ll then turn to three texts in which the nation has been characterized from the outside – each of these sections will be assessed through a research essay – before considering with guidance from practicing authors how contemporary writing might model techniques for capturing a sense of place, history, and identity in an original creative piece, and reflecting on this process in a critical commentary. This module builds on the work of EN1901 Reading English to give extended and deeper understanding of major literary texts in drama, verse and prose, as well as the opportunity to put some of the techniques studied into practice in a creative piece. The module aims to interrogate the concepts of nation and territory across a wide variety of historical and current examples, and to explore the entanglement of social and environmental justice with the idea of place.