Books by Cairns (Glucksman Professor Irish and Scottish Studies Craig

Muriel Spark's oeuvre is contextualised in the tradition of Christian existentialism and its insistence on 'being towards death'.

The Wealth of the Nation' explores how Scotland has continued to assert its distinctive cultural difference despite the three-hundred-year union with England and the modern forces of globalisation.

A major reconsideration of our understanding of the development of Scottish culture from the Enlightenment to the present day.

Provides an account of the philosophical and psychological theories in the British empiricist tradition that provoked some of the most radical changes in literary form between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.

In the last quarter century, Scottish novelists from Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and Allan Massie to James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy and Irvine Welsh have achieved significant international success.