This study is the first monograph on the Scottish writer Brian McCabe. It focuses mainly on McCabe’s fiction and on the elements in his writing that allow for a redefinition of individual and national identity. The book opens with an examination of the socio-cultural context that shapes McCabe’s position in contemporary Scottish literature. The author goes on to consider McCabe as a writer of the Second Renaissance and the generation of the Lost Poets, and also focuses on the Scottish preoccupation with identity and its representations in the contemporary Scottish short story. Finally, she provides a chronological and thematic analysis of McCabe’s short story collections The Lipstick Circus, In a Dark Room with a Stranger and A Date with my Wife, and his novel The Other McCoy.

Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen is a lecturer at Centro Universitario de la Defensa de Zaragoza. She completed her PhD thesis on the work of Brian McCabe in 2010 and was then awarded a scholarship by the Saltire Society for Scottish Studies. Her main areas of research are contemporary Scottish literature and identity studies. She is also an editor at Jekyll & Jill Editores and has translated several works by Brian McCabe and published them in Spain.