Articles and Chapters on Sir Walter Scott Published in 2015

Articles and Chapters on Sir Walter Scott Published in 2015

An Annotated Bibliography

This year saw the publication of one special issue of a journal exclusively devoted to Scott studies. Vol. 7.2 of the Scottish Literary Review featured selected papers from the 10th International Sir Walter Scott Conference held at the University of Aberdeen, 8-12 July 2014. For details of the individual pieces, see Goslee, Hewitt, Hughes, McCracken-Flesher, MacRae, Rigney, Shepherd, and Watt.

Adams, Maeve. '"The force of my narrative": Persuasion, Nation, and Paratext in Walter Scott's Early Waverley Novels', ELH, 82 (2015), 937-67.

This essay revisits Scott’s theory of 'the force of…narrative' and argues that the elaborate paratexts of his early Waverley novels (Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary) constitute an expression of (and experiment in) that theory. In his early Waverley novels and book review essays, Scott joined his contemporaries in grappling with the demise of classical rhetoric, elaborating a theory of narrative force by rethinking the two dominant Romantic conceptions of force: military force and rhetorical force. This essay thus reveals some overlooked origins of Scott’s innovative form of historical fiction and his theory of the novel.

Bock, Oliver, and Wolfgang G. Müller. 'The Survival of the Poetic Muse in Sir Walter Scott's Historical Novels', Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch im Auftrage der Görres-Gesellschaft, 56 (2015), 271-96.

Burden, Michael. 'The Novel in the Musical Theatre: Pamela, Caleb Williams, Frankenstein, and Ivanhoe', in The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ed. Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 193-211.

Includes a discussion of Samuel Beazley’s Ivanhoe; or, The Knight Templar, staged at Covent Garden from 2 March1820, after a brief overview of other stage and operatic adaptations of the same novel.

Callus, Ivan. 'Fiction's Afterlives: Character Migration and Reading Memory', E-rea, 13 (2015) <https://journals.openedition.org/erea/4755 > [accessed 19 June 2019]

On the non-migration of Scott's characters (particularly the eponymous hero of Ivanhoe) across literary and paraliterary texts and contexts, their limited afterlife, and failure to survive in post-19th-century cultural memory.

Duncan, Ian. 'The Discovery of Scotland: Walter Scott and World Literature in the Age of Union', in Scotland 2014 and Beyond: Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence?, ed. Klaus Peter Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015)

Pagination unknown.

Duncan, Ian. 'Modernity's Other Worlds', in British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, ed. Mark Canuel (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 505-517.

On Rob Roy.

Duncan, Ian. 'Walter Scott and the Historical Novel', in The Oxford History of the Novel in English. 2, English and British Fiction 1750-1820, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O'Brien (Oxford; New York: OUP, 2015), pp. 312-31.

Ferris, Ina. 'From ‘National Tale’ to ‘Historical Novel’: Edgeworth, Morgan, and Scott', in British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, ed. Mark Canuel (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 187-97.

Galaby, Huda A. ‘Sir Walter Scott: A Supreme Purveyor of Scottish History and Society’, International Journal of English and Education, 4.1 (2015), 439-45 <http://ijee.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/LT_7.36200745.pdf> [accessed 29 April 2015]

Goslee, Nancy Moore. 'Larder and Library: Revising Archives in Castle Dangerous', Scottish Literary Review, 7:2 (2015), 63-73.

As material text and artistic work, Castle Dangerous includes multiple archives. Ian Duncan reads the barbaric historical episode of the 'Douglas larder', recalled by two characters in Scott's main narrative, as an 'anti-archive' representing the collapse of romance, chivalric ideals, and indeed all human cultural values into an abject midden-heap. Both his declining health and his fears of the impending Reform Bill influence Scott's pessimism. Expanding his version of the larder episode, however, Scott's fictional minstrel Bertram describes an alternative space--the 'study' or library. Surviving Douglas's burning of the castle, the library sustains multiple minstrel/archivists, from a ghostly Thomas the Rhymer to Scott himself as still-adept imaginative architect. Although the larder represents Derrida's 'anti-archive' as thanatos, the library salvages a positive archive, a source of eros to re-energise and shape the future --but only by acknowledging this tension. Within the contrasting erotic plots of his main narrative, Scott introduces a further archive: ongoing refigurings of William Wallace. Through it, he critiques chivalric romances and their codes, yet recasts them to imagine an accommodation for conservatives within a post-Reform electorate.

Hewitt, David. 'All Ye Know on Earth, and All Ye Need to Know', Scottish Literary Review, 7:2 (2015), 35-50..

This article opens by surveying Scott's work as an editor of literature, historical documents, and memoirs between 1802 and 1815. It argues that he was the first to recognise that in transmission texts deteriorate, but that his main aim in editing was to prevent loss, both of the texts and the memory of them. It demonstrates that he deploys the knowledge gleaned from editing in the notes to the long poems, but argues that his greatest achievement was in naturalising this learning in the speech of characters in his 'Scotch' novels. It contends that the change in artistic methodology was prompted by his experience of editing memoirs, and by his own experiments in life-writing. It concludes by suggesting that Scott was actuated by the extraordinary ambition of unifying knowledge within the autonomous work of art, and of harmonising all that is known within his oeuvre.

Hughes, Gillian. 'Pickling Virgil?: Scott's Notes to The Lay of the Last Minstrel', Scottish Literary Review, 7:2 (2015), 51-62.

Modern editions of Scott's narrative poems often omit his notes, which frequently extend well beyond straightforward elucidation to seem embarrassingly prolix or obscurely antiquarian. However, unlike the notes to his novels, the notes to Scott's poems were present from first publication. Their function for the early nineteenth-century reader is discussed with relation to Scott's first long narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, where their treatment of the supernatural is compared with that of the verse itself. With Scott, tropes of translation, scholarship, and antiquarianism serve to widen access to the uncanny and remind readers that even in the most enlightened age the human imagination responds powerfully to extra-rational explanation. Scott's notes are a vital part of his poems.

Jager, Colin. 'Hippogriffs in the Library: Realism and Opposition from Hume to Scott', in Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 125-52.

Charts the development of a social and literary mode aimed at containing the Jacobite threat, from Hume to Scott's Waverley and Rob Roy, culminating in the thing that Scott calls 'history' and which literary studies calls 'novelistic realism'. See also Jager 2009 and Jager 2011.

Knox, John T. '"I am not writing anything just now": A Letter from Walter Scott to Sarah Smith, February 13, 1814', Studies in Scottish Literature, 41 (2015), 259-66.

Discusses Waverley.

McCracken-Flesher, Caroline. 'Anxiety in the Archive: from the Antiquary to the Absent Author', Scottish Literary Review, 7.2 (2015), 75-94.

Reading through Susan Stewart's theories of longing, and Carolyn Steedman's theory of dust, this article considers how Walter Scott, writing poetry and novels, contained the environment, but also pointed to its excess and uncontainability. Scott's house at Abbotsford is a jewel box that constrains history, yet with Scott's works shelved alongside disparate artefacts inside a house that itself expresses national history and is set in an expansive landscape, Abbotsford mediates and invites a wilder world. With the interpretive author no longer in evidence, the archive is a site of productive anxiety..

McCracken-Flesher, Caroline. 'Sir Walter Scott: Life-Writing as Anti-Romance', Wordsworth Circle, 46 (2015), 102-108.

Discusses Scott's Journal and the autobiographial 'Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott' printed in Lockhart's Life of Scott.

MacRae, Lucy. '"A vast o' bits o' stories": Shortreed, Laidlaw and Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border', Scottish Literary Review, 7.2 (2015), 95-117.

Editing Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Scott sought to salvage and preserve the cultural memory of the Border region. As much was brought to his attention through his extensive network of contributors as was gleaned from his own antiquarian study and capacious memory. This paper examines the role of Scott's friendships with Robert Shortreed of Jedburgh (1762-1829) and William Laidlaw of Yarrow (1779-1845). Although the two men are largely unacknowledged within the Minstrelsy itself, both Shortreed and Laidlaw provided Scott with significant assistance before and after the publication of the first edition. While Shortreed introduced Scott to the remote corners of Roxburghshire during the so-called 'Liddesdale Raids' of the 1790s, Laidlaw was a prolific collector of ballads in Selkirkshire during the early 1800s. The memoirs of the two men, combined with extant correspondence and historical evidence concerning the families, provide fascinating insights into the social networks of the area as well as the cultural contexts surrounding the Minstrelsy's creation. This paper examines what the Shortreed and Laidlaw families can reveal about Border life at the turn of the nineteenth century, and assesses the place of the Minstrelsy ballads in the contemporary cultural memory of the region.

May, Chad T. 'Sir Walter Scott's The Monastery and the Representation of Religious Belief', Studies in Scottish Literature, 41 (2015), 191-208.

Mayer, Robert. 'Scott's Editing: History, Polyphony, Authority', Modern Philology, 112 (2015), 661-90.

Discusses, in particular, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and Scott's edition of the Works of Dryden (1808).

Murphy, Olivia. 'Invasion and Resistance in Mansfield Park, The Wanderer, Patronage and Waverley', Sydney Studies in English, 41 (2015), 17-30.

Napton, Dani. 'Sir Walter Scott: Home, Nation, and the Denial of Revolution', in Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions, ed. A. D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 250-65.

Discusses Waverley and Redgauntlet.

Pardoe, James. 'Aura and Authenticity and the Presentation of UK Literary figures through the Medium of the Home', Scrutiny2, 20:2 (2015), 65-79.

By exploring case studies from the United Kingdom, this article investigates how the notions of aura and authenticity associated with literary homes are utilised to create an impact on the understanding of the lives and works of associated writers. The boundaries of the article are dictated by its place within 21st- century manifestations of the survival, conservation and reproduction of literary homes associated with four writers active in the early 19th century: Byron,Keats, Scott and Shelley. Many of the works within the literary house genre highlight the significance of the link between writers and their audiences. However, whereas commentators represent the links as direct, this article shows that the association is based on narratives validated through those who were subsequently responsible for the houses in conjunction with the expectations of visitors. Consequently, the interpretation prevalent in the houses in the 21st century are the result of a long history based on the writers, but influenced by what was, and is, considered their significance by others over approximately 200 years.

Peacocke, Emma. 'Facing History: Galleries and Portraits in Waverley's Historiography', in Romanticism and the Museum (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 57-86.

Analyses how art galleries and portrait galleries are a crucial component in Scott�s elaborate historical and national framework in Waverley. The novel tacitly advocates a new, more detail-oriented mode of thinking about history and aesthetics, in which public museums and displays are prominent means of contrasting past and present, both in their content and in viewers� ability to understand and historically situate what they see. An earlier version appeared in the European Romantic Review, 22 (2011).

Piper, Andrew. 'Processing', in British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, ed. Mark Canuel (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 601-614.

On The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

Rangarajan, Padma. 'History's Rank Stew: Walter Scott, James Mill, and the Politics of Time', Romanticism, 21 (2015), 59-71.

Reads Chronicles of the Canongate as an interrogation of imperial geopolitics, offering, in particular, a counterpoint to James Mill's The History of British India (1817).

Rigney, Ann. 'Things and the Archive: Scott's Materialist Legacy', Scottish Literary Review, 7.2 (2015), 13-34.

This paper approaches Scott's writings, his antiquarianism, and his husbandry in an integrated way, treating them together from the perspective of his keen awareness of the materialised presence of the past in the physical environment. Scott's ecological approach to cultural memory, as expressed both in his fictions (particularly The Antiquary) and in his activities, explains his long-lasting influence on material culture and on practices of commemoration.

Sabiron, Céline. 'Exhuming the Vestigial Antique body in Walter Scott's Caledonia', Miranda, 11 (2015)

Pagination unknown. Discusses the portrayal of the transition from Roman antiquity to Scottish modernity in Guy Mannering and The Antiquary.

Scalia, Christopher J. 'Walter Scott's "everlasting said he's and said she's": Dialogue, Painting, and the Status of the Novel', ELH, 82 (2015), 1159-77.

This essay explores Walter Scott’s theories of dialogue, and in particular his comparisons of fictional speech to the art of painting. It argues that in prefatory material to both The Bride of Lammermoor and Ivanhoe, Scott draws on contemporary theories of painting to explain his use of dialogue, but the texts contradict each other in an important way: while the former underscores the stark contrast between the arts, the latter insists upon their similarities. I argue that this inconsistency is Scott’s attempt to present a multi-front vindication of the novel in which dialogue represents both the traditional techniques and innovative possibilities of the form, its simultaneous distance from and proximity to more ancient and critically appreciated arts.

Sheley, Erin L. 'Doubled Jeopardy: The Condemned Woman as Historical Relic', in Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, and Emotion, ed. Nancy E. Johnson (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 2015), pp. 89-110.

This chapter explores how Scott's condemned women serve as relics through which a history of evolving British legal authority becomes present and legible. It argues that Scott's treatment of gender aestheticizes a particular concept of and reaction to the condemned woman in the context of the common law tradition generally. Using the backdrop of 18th-century penal practice, it also shows how Scott establishes the female condemned body as an object necessarily fixed in time in order to contemplate legal change through a historically controlled process. The first part of the article considers the late 18th-century movement to abolish the punishment of burning at the stake for women convicted of treason, and the extent to which competing understandings of chivalry reified an entire history of penal practice into the body of the burned woman. The second part argues that the interrelations between archaic practice and evolved norm which characterize the precedent-based common law system are dramatized in the fixed, idealized bodies of Constance de Beverly (Marmion) and Rebecca (Ivanhoe) through which Scott acknowledges the implicit need for legal change over time, while simultaneously legitimizing adherence to a chivalric tradition. See also Sheley 2014.

Shepherd, Deirdre. 'Hunting for Walter Scott', Scottish Literary Review, 7.2 (2015), 135-45.

Scott has a spectral presence in the early Victorian fiction of R. S. Surtees (1805-1865) that has hithertoo gone unnoticed. R. S. Surtees was best known as a sportsman, magazine editor (The Sporting Life), and author of comic novels that were notable for their satirical subplots of love and marriage. Rather like Scott, he has fallen from favour with readers, and the frequent references to the Waverley Novels by Surtees seem to be equally unremarked. Shepherd argues that this is another example of what Ann Rigney might describe as a cultural 'afterlife' of Walter Scott and one that deserves greater scrutiny. Surtees' focus on the pleasures and perils of fox hunting parallels Scott's depictions of the chase as an arena within which he could explore matters of deceit, conflict and negotiations interest

Tulloch, Graham. 'Walter Scott, the Bushranger and the Bandit', in 'Whaddaya Know?': Writings for Syd Harrex, ed. Ron Blaber (Mile End, SA: Wakefield Press, 2015), pp. 14-26.

Discusses Scott's interest in the Australian bushranger Michael Howe (a rare copy of whose biography by Samuel Marsden is in the Library at Abbotsford) and the Calabrian bandit Francesco Moscato (as attested by his unfinished novella 'Bizarro') and what it tells us about Scott's reaction to extreme violence.

Twomey, Ryan. 'Sir Walter Scott's Waverley: A Literary Pivot Point between Maria Edgeworth and George Eliot', Sydney Studies in English, 41 (2015), 47-60.

Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. 'Historical Redgauntlet: Jacobite Delusions and Hanoverian Fantasies', Romanticism, 21 (2015), 145-59.

Watt, Julie. '"We did not think that he could die": Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Afterlife of Scott's Heroines', Scottish Literary Review, 7.2 (2015), 119-34.

Scott acknowledged that he was unable to create believable female characters, unlike Austen and Ferrier. However, in the 1830s, the popular English poet, Letitia Landon, who was an avid enthusiast for Scott's work, wrote a series of essays, 'The Female Portrait Gallery', each devoted to analysing the heroine of a novel by Scott,. Landon does not criticise Scott's creations in her essays, but from a twenty-first-century perspective, one has to agree with Scott's own opinion of his female characters; his young women are idealised abstractions and the older ones caricatures. But where a heroine is based on a real person, such as Alice Lee in Woodstock (who was probably inspired by his own daughter) such a female character, while still an unattainable archetype, seems somewhat more lifelikeerest in the

Welge, Jobst. 'Periphery and Genealogical Discontinuity: The Historical Novel of the Celtic Fringe (Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott)’, in Genealogical Fictions: Cultural Periphery and Historical Change in the Modern Novel (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015), pp. 16-37.

Whyte, Christopher. 'What Walter Scott Can Offer Us Today', in Gael and Lowlander in Scottish Literature: Cross-Currents in Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Christopher MacLachlan and Ronald W. Renton (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2015), pp. 56-71.

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