A literary study of a productive unionist and nationalist tension in contemporary British culture.

As Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales gain self-governance from England, writers in these nations face new pressures to create distinctly national literatures. Compatriots or Competitors? examines the artistic tension in this work, as writers both emulate neighboring traditions and reinforce distinctions between nations. Across a range of texts from each of the United Kingdom’s four nations, Hywel Dix maps the creative productivity of this interplay between Unionism and nationalism across Great Britain.