Abstract
This chapter argues that constitutional realism, financial realism, and aesthetic realism all work in the same way – they unify experience in a universal time that exists beyond any person or people. Britain is the paradigm of ‘capitalist realism’, indeed is capitalist realism, demanding a very high degree of adjustment of experience to public truth – something again familiar from the demands for personal performance in neoliberalism. And conversely self-determination can be understood as a conflict with realist time or universalist time, growing from the 1980s (the ‘Scottish Literary Renaissance’) through the 2010s – and the desire to build not from adjustment but from experience. In this sense the ’14 independence referendum can itself be understood fundamentally as an interruption of realist or universalist time.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Robert Miles (2002) ‘The 1790s: The effulgence of Gothic’, in ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 41–62.
Michael Gardiner (2012a) The Return of England in English Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 110–116.
cf. Ian Baucom (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2009) Lyrical Ballads (London: Routledge (1801–1802)), pp. 299–304.
A. V. Dicey (1979) An Introduction to the Law of the Constitution, p. 422, p. 441; cf. Michael Gardiner (2013) The Constitution of English Literature (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 61–62.
S.T. Coleridge (1830) On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each: Lay Sermons (London: Hurst, Chance and Co. (1829)), p. 3.
Francis Mulhern (1979) The Moment of Scrutiny (London: New Left Books), p. 257.
F.R. Leavis (2008) The Great Tradition (London: Faber (1948)), p. 14.
F.R. Leavis (1933) For Continuity (Cambridge: Gordon Fraser/Minority Press).
I.A. Richards (1924) The Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul); I.A. Richards (1929) Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Kegan Paul).
T.S. Eliot (1999) ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber (1919)), p. 15.
On the inheritance from S.T. Coleridge, for example, in Statesman’s Manual (1816) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), see Gardiner, The Constitution of English Literature, pp. 39–42.
wr. Willy Russell, dir. Lewis Gilbert (1983) Educating Rita (Acorn Pictures).
Edmund Burke (2009) Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1790)), p. 126, p. 157.
Alasdair Gray (2002) Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (Edinburgh: Canongate (1981)), pp. 243–244.
Virginia Woolf (1965) ‘Robinson Crusoe’, The Common Reader (Second Series) (London: Hogarth (1932)), pp. 51–58; Virginia Woolf (1968) ‘Defoe’, The Common Reader (First Series) (London: Hogarth (1925)), pp. 121–131.
Karl Marx trans. Ben Fowkes (1990) Capital: Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin (1867)), pp. 169–170.
Daniel Defoe (1799) History of the Union (Dublin: J. Exshaw (1709)), p. 59, p. 61.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Michael Gardiner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gardiner, M. (2015). Cracked Realism. In: Time and Action in the Scottish Independence Referendum. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545947_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545947_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57905-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54594-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political Science CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)