This chapter traces the progression of nationalist writing in Wales and Scotland from the Popular Front fiction of the 1930s through to the devolved nations of the twenty-first century. Raymond Williams’s changing position on the nationalist question is charted and related to the work of the political theorist Tom Nairn. Williams is further analysed in the second half of the chapter as an indicative case study of a creative writer who drew on the legacy of the 1930s writers in order to tackle the centralist tendencies of English literature. In the process, Williams himself became a protagonist in the devolution struggle and is portrayed as such in John Osmond’s Ten Million Stars Are Burning (2018). The chapter concludes by discussing why documentary approaches, such as Osmond’s novel and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010), are important to the fictional representations of the struggle for Welsh and Scottish independence.

This chapter turns to the nationalist critique of the British state from the 1960s. It demonstrates how indebted independence supporters have been to the writings of Tom Nairn and the wider New Left’s characterisation of Britain as an antediluvian relic that historically evaded an adequate process of modernisation. In particular, the chapter demonstrates the importance of ‘imperialism’ to nationalist thinking, insofar as nationalists saw the fundamental weakness of British national identity as its close connection with empire and the economic ‘decline’ of the British state as related to its loss of colonial possessions. However, the chapter also documents the fading away of the Marxist and economistic elements of this critique of Britain over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, to be replaced by a robust, but avowedly political, democratic republicanism, which identified the British state’s chief shortcoming as a failure to become a proper bourgeois democracy.