Book excerpt: Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament asserts that while Scotland's new Parliament (1999) is a creation of laws, politics, and economics, some of the forces underpinning it are cultural, therefore constantly alive and insistently creative. Scotland may not be confined by, but has always lived within and moved forward and outward, through its signs and stories. In the moment of the new Parliament, it is time to cast up Scotland's accounts of past and present, and to review the nation's futures. Readers will find the usual signs of Scotland foregrounded, questioned, and re-energized as contributors trace the dynamic toward a Scottish Parliament. And they will find new signs, whether sounds, sights, or souvenirs come into play, revealing today's performance of a dynamic Scotland. Caroline McCracken-Flesher teaches the novel, the British eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Scottish literature, and literary theory at the University of Wyoming.