No treatment of Scottish literature since the 1990s can ignore the significant roles played by Duncan McLean. As a writer, McLean has produced a large and distinctive body of work, including the novels Blackden (1994) and Bunker Man (1995), an award-winning collection of short stories, and a travel book charting his quest for the heart of Western Swing music in Texas. As one of the cofounders of Clocktower Press, he has published, in photocopied booklets, many of the leading writers of his generation, including Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, and Alan Warner. McLean, and the writers he has promoted, may be seen as part of the resurgence in Scottish literature that started in the 1970s but came to wider notice only with the publication of Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and Kelman's Not Not While the Giro (1983).

Critics and commentators have labeled these authors variously as the "Scottish...