Type the word “Scottish” into the search facility of Amazon.com, the world’s biggest online bookshop, and you get an instant snapshot of what American readers want to know about the greatest little country in the world.

At the top of the bestseller list is a grooming guide to Scottish terriers, which promises to reveal “just how to turn this handsome and alert little dog into a trusted family pet”. Richly illustrated tomes about golf, Scottish clans and Highland castles follow closely behind, with Scottish romance novels and guides to tracing your clan roots also selling merrily.

But if a new initiative by Scottish academics and booksellers takes off then American readers could soon be settling down to read about the travails of a woman tenant farmer in rural Aberdeenshire in the years before and after the first world war, or the adventures of Scotland’s greatest hero long before he became “Braveheart”. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song, and Blind Harry’s Wallace are just two of the classic Scottish literary works being promoted to American academics at a conference in Washington DC this December.

Last year, thanks largely to the efforts of Ian Duncan, a Scots-born professor at Berkeley university in California, the Modern Language Association (MLA) recognised Scottish writing as a national literature alongside Canadian, Irish and Australian writing. The apparently arcane decision has opened the door to Scottish writers and publishers who see a new market in the American university sector.

“There is clearly a huge demand from American students to learn about Scottish literature,” says Professor Murray Pittock of Manchester University, co-editor of the Scottish Studies Review. “As more and more start to identify themselves as Scots-Americans that can only grow. But nonetheless there is a long way to go in promoting Scottish literature in US universities.”

While Scots were responsible for establishing a clutch of US universities, those same universities have been slow to found departments of Scottish studies, though Irish studies departments with their attendant grants, endowed chairs and research opportunities, bloom.

Up until now it has been hard to find Scottish books when you need them in the US, though it has not been hard to interest students in Scottish courses when they are available.

Euan Hague, a Scottish-born academic who teaches at Chicago’s DePaul University has conducted research on the perceptions that modern Americans have of Scotland. He welcomes the initiative: “I think promoting Scottish literature at the MLA is a good start but other moves could be made — I recently saw Nick Hornby speak to a standing-room-only audience at the Printers Row Book Fair annual event in Chicago. Events such as this would arguably be more likely to reach a mainstream US audience than the MLA conference.”

The Scottish novels that have sold well in the US market have been driven by movie successes. Irvine Welsh’s novels started to sell in serious numbers in America after Trainspotting made it big on the East Coast. But the real irony behind this attempt to promote Scottish literature in America is that Scots writers have long been central to the development of American letters. Walter Scott was such an important influence on the arcane codes of honour of the American South that Mark Twain famously blamed him for starting the civil war. Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson have had a disproportionate impact on American novels and poetry.

But there are clear gaps: JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, that classic tale of adolescent alienation is studied in high schools across America though very few have read Coming Through the Rye, the Robert Burns poem that inspired its title.

But given that the reason Americans are increasingly interested in all things Scottish is because more and more are realising that they are Scottish, perhaps it’s time to emphasise the force of ancestral loyalty in American writing.

Salinger’s mother was a member of the Scottish diaspora: perhaps Holden Caulfield’s existentialist gloom owes more to Scottish miserabilism than to adolescent angst.

And the more you dig up the roots of novel writing in America, you realise how many come up tartan: Washington Irving, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, two books about places where nothing seems to change for centuries was, appropriately, the son of an Orcadian fisherman. The great American novel Moby Dick was clearly inspired by the sea life of the Firth of Forth given that Herman Melville’s family came from Fife.

Indeed it is when American literature is at its most American that it is at its most Scottish: the screenplay of the great Western movie Shane was written by AB Guthrie, another lost Scot. To that distinguished contribution to Hollywood should be added that of Lorna Moon, born Nora Low in Strichen in the northeast of Scotland, who wrote screenplays for Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson.

But though Scots have made a stellar contribution to American literature, it’s a moot point whether the best way to educate Americans about contemporary Scotland is to let them loose on the Scottish novel.

Hague believes that anybody trying to increase knowledge of modern Scotland in the US through studying Scottish literature faces an uphill task. “I have spoken with people here who have assumed that Queen Elizabeth II rules over Scotland, denying Scots the freedoms and liberties that Americans take for granted. Many are not aware of the parliament or contemporary Scottish political issues. There is a lot of work still to do.”

Thankfully, when it comes to Scottish literature, there is more than enough to go around.

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