Articles and Chapters on Sir Walter Scott Published in 2016

Articles and Chapters on Sir Walter Scott Published in 2016

An Annotated Bibliography

Tom Bragg. '"A Certain Kind of Space": Walter Scott and the Poetics of Historical Novel Space’, in Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 24-56.

Tom Bragg. ‘(Mis)Reading the Palimpsest: Readers of Waverley Space’, in Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 57-96.

Campbell, Timothy. 'Walter Scott's Fashion Systems', in Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740-1830 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

Pagination unknown.

Cassity, Conny. 'Refracted Artifacts: The Honours of Scotland's Illusion of Security', English Language Notes, 54 (2016), 121-23.

Elliott, Elizabeth. 'Walter Scott's Bannatyne Club, Elite Male Associational Culture, and the Making of Identities', Review of English Studies, 67 (2016), 732-50.

Examination of the choice of George Bannatyne (1545-1607/8) as titular patron for the antiquarian printing society founded by Sir Walter Scott, the Bannatyne Club (1823-1861), casts new light on the elite male associational culture of the gentleman’s club at a moment of transition from amateur scholarship to the professional academic work of universities and learned societies. In celebrating Bannatyne, the Club engages in self-conscious practices of myth-making that illuminate the members’ sense of their own relationship to the past, and of the Club’s function in endorsing a distinctive Scottish identity in the context of political union. Analysis of a collection of papers compiled by club member, James Nairne, offers evidence of the complex intersection of personal and scholarly motivations at work, and of the significance of the past in shaping personal and collective identities.

Fancett, Anna. 'The Mother's Word: Maternity and Writing in Walter Scott', Scottish Literary Review, 8.2 (2016), 55-72.

This study investigates the startling yet often hidden connection between maternity and writing in Scott’s novels. Within the context of problematised or absent depictions of maternity, and fraught anxieties surrounding the authority of and the ability to narrate narratives textually, this article explores how the connection between these two discourses raises further tensions. The article opens by drawing from scholarly work on the role of writing and orality, and the presentation of maternity and gender, to explore how the two are connected. By developing current scholarship in this area, and by offering close textual readings of Waverley, Guy Mannering and The Monastery, this article concludes that whilst orality may be connected to females more generally, writing is the domain of women who fulfil Romantic ideologies of maternity. The article then proceeds to argue that the relationship between maternity and writing raises further anxieties about the position of textual narrative in a way

Goldberg, Brian. 'Debt, Taxes, and Reform in Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 71 (2016), 343-68.

Count Robert of Paris treats 'debt' in a way determined by Scott’s response to the Reform Crisis of 1830-1832. Scott’s solution to the reformist impulse was the reintroduction of the income tax. He believed that an income tax would give the nation’s elites an opportunity to acknowledge their duties and contribute their fair share toward the payment of the national war debt, thus stabilizing the economy and eliminating a crucial motive for reform legislation. Count Robert of Paris reimagines this solution by translating the nation’s relationship to government debt into a system of personal indebtedness.

Griffiths, Devin. ‘Crossing the Border with Walter Scott’, in The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016), pp. 83-128.

Discusses Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Waverley, The Antiquary, and Ivanhoe.

Heimlich, Timothy. '"We wed not with the stranger": Disjunctive Histories, Fluid Geographies, and Contested Nationalities in Romantic Fictions of Wales', Studies in Romanticism, 55 (2016), 211-38.

Includes a discussion of The Betrothed.

Hopkins, Izabela. 'Beyond Coincidence: Scottish Inflections in Thomas Nelson Page's Gordon Keith and Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction', South Central Review, 33.3 (2016), 53-68.

Includes a discussion of Scott's influence on US novelist Thomas Nelson Page.

Jones, Emrys D. '"Never in Bedlam?": Madness and History in Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian', Studies in Romanticism, 55 (2016), 537-58.

Leypoldt, Günter. 'Degrees of Public Relevance: Walter Scott and Toni Morrison', Modern Language Quarterly, 77 (2016), 369-93.

How can we relate the quantitative presence of literary artifacts to their ability to make a difference, and how does the problem of scale define public accounts of what can be considered relevant literary value? The idea of a singular space of reception (one literary 'marketplace', say, or one 'public sphere') is unhelpful. Rather, literary artifacts have potentially multiple social lives that differ in their relation to 'sacralized' and 'everyday' practices. An aesthetic object can thrive in many simultaneous or successive practice spaces that use and value it differently and that embed it in differing sites of authority. Moving from the Romantic period to the present, this article looks at the trajectories of Walter Scott as an earlier and Toni Morrison as a recent candidate for culturally relevant authors.

Lynch, Andrew. 'Dialogic History: Walter Scott’s Medieval Voices', postmedieval, 7.2 (2016), 285-88.

Walter Scott’s fictional voicing of the middle ages involves multiple linguistic and poetic forms to outline long-term processes of historical conflict in Scotland and England. Speech and voice in Scott repeatedly mark out cultural and political frontiers: gentle/common; Highland/Lowland; Norman/Saxon; commercial/feudal. Although Ivanhoe applauds the development of modern polite English as a sign of national cohesion, it also portrays it as a homogenising threat to less powerful language cultures.

McCracken-Flesher, Caroline. 'Better than to Arrive: The Last Voyage of Walter Scott, Romantic', European Romantic Review, 27 (2016), 475-87.

By 1831, early death in adverse circumstances had become a popular marker for Romanticism and a driving force in “necromantic” literary tourism. Walter Scott, however, daily was exceeding the span allotted to many a contemporary writer and challenging both discourses. Now, verging toward death, he set out on a journey around the Mediterranean in search of health. At 61, and reduced to ordinariness by the sufferings of age, the author focused inward, studying the mysteries of his failing mind. Scott thus mapped an undiscovered country, demonstrating what it could mean if Romanticism’s practitioners could ever venture through maturity and beyond.

Napton, Dani, and A. D. Cousins. ‘Counter-Revolutionary Transformations of Charles I in Burke, Austen and Scott.’ Journal of English Studies, 14 (2016) 137-54.

This essay considers mythologizings of Charles I by Edmund Burke, Jane Austen and Walter Scott. These three writers, albeit to different degrees and in different ways, saw Charles's pertinence to then-current debates against revolution, that is to say, to advocacy of counter-revolution at the time of or in the shadow of the French Revolution. Specifically this essay focuses initially on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France which shaped the framework of much conservative thinking from 1790. Thereafter the essay considers affinities between Burke’s text (and his text’s divergences from) non-fiction and fiction by the politically conservative Jane Austen and Walter Scott. The focus is on two pre-eminent myths authored or authorised by the monarch himself which endured into and beyond the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Charles as the Royal Martyr and Charles as Christ (and, hence, as intercessor for his people).

Pilote, Pauline. '"Knight errantry run wild", or, Chivalry Revisited in Fenimore Cooper's and Washington Irving's Narratives', Études anglaises, 69 (2016), 427-42.

The publication of Ivanhoe crystallized a romantic and idealised vision of chivalry that had been growing for some time and its tremendous popularity fostered a general enthusiasm among American readers, publishers, and writers alike. The latter, and in particular Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, used the notion of chivalry to portray Native Americans in their fictions. However, the degenerate turn that they impart to medieval trappings, as they transfer them onto the New World wilderness, is loaded with the political concerns of the Early Republic, recasting this British imprint as a thing of the past, bound to fade away in the face of more modern values. American heroes are now fit to take over, as this relic of the Old Europe is placed in an irrecoverable past.

Pratt Russell, Kathryn. 'Walter Scott's Two Nations and the State of the Textile Industry in Britain', in Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, ed Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016), pp. 174-98.

This chapter examines Scott’s deliberately anachronistic celebration of cloth (in particular, linen) as a truly patriotic commodity. Partly prompted by his suspicions of working-class radicalism during his novel-writing period (1814–32), Scott developed a novelistic celebration of truly ‘aristocratic’ cloth—fine linen—and used it to represent the finest qualities he associated with the nation whose bard he had hoped he had become. Not surprisingly, the choice of linen as a commodity reflects as well an implicit denigration (and thus suspicion) of the mass-produced commodity par excellence, cotton, because of its association with working-class radicalism.

Price, Fiona. 'The End of History?: Scott, His Precursors and the Violent Past', in Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the British Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 170-206.

Includes discussions of The Antiquary, Ivanhoe, and St. Ronan's Well.

Sabiron, Céline. 'Walter Scott and the Geographical Novel', in Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History, ed. Emmanuelle Peraldo (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), pp. 206-221.

On Waverley.

Schulkins, Rachel. 'Immodest otherness: nationalism and the exotic Jewess in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe', Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 12 (2016)

Pagination unknown.

Sommer, Tim. 'Deceptive Signification: Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, and Eighteenth-Century Hermit Discourse', Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 64 (2016), 385-98.

Since the latter part of the19th century, critics have tended to treat Walter Scott’s fiction disparagingly – the tacit assumption often being that it lacks formal sophistication or semantic ‘depth.’ Reading Scott against the grain of this reception, this article argues that Ivanhoe commands an allusive density which complicates such verdicts. Offering a detailed analysis of both the novel’s hermit figure and the cultural geography in which it appears, this essay retraces Scott’s references to 18th-century literary, aesthetic, architectural, and horticultural discourses. Acutely aware of drawing from a codified set of readily consumable images, Scott both quotes and subverts the eighteenth-century hermit tradition. Employing an elaborately intertextual strategy to defamiliarize readerly notions of identity and signification, Scott’s writing emerges as somewhat more complex than the history of his critical reception would seem to suggest.

Stroh, Silke. 'From Flirtations with Romantic Otherness to a More Integrated National Synthesis: "Gentleman savages" in Walter Scott's Novel Waverley', in Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination: Anglophone writing from 1600 to 1900 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2016), pp.141-84.

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