Alone among novelists of the Romantic period, Austen and Scott, have been continuously reprinted, read, and discussed from first publication until the present day. In this study, Bautz traces how Scott’s nineteenth-century success among all classes of readers made him the most admired and widely read novelist in history, only for his standing to plummet sharply in the twentieth century. Austen’s popularity, by contrast, has risen inexorably, overtaking Scott’s, and bringing about a reversal in reputation that would have been unthinkable in the authors’ own time. To assess the reactions of readers belonging to diverse interpretative communities, Bautz draws on a wide range of indicators, including editions, publisher’s relaunches, sales, reviews, library catalogues and lending figures, private comments in diaries and letters, and popularisations. She charts the reception of each author over two centuries, explaining literary tastes and their determinants, and illuminating the broader culture of successive audiences.

This collection of essays studies the role of Abbotsford in the history of Scottish antiquarianism, and its significance for understanding both Scott himself and his later influence. It examines the image of Scott that he projected at and through his house, and looks at the impact of its design, ambiance, and decoration not only in Britain but as far away as Russia. A particular feature is the detailed examination of Scott's collections, which are placed within the context of the Scottish antiquarian tradition which Scott did so much to establish and consolidate. Individual contributions are listed under Articles and Chapters on Sir Walter Scott Published in 2003. See I. G. Brown 2003b, Cannizzo 2003, Cheape, Cowie, and Wallace 2003, Frew 2003, Howard 2003, D. Jones 2003, Lawson 2003, and Lloyd 2003.

Examines the ways in which romance forms characteristic of "boys' books" -- as exemplified in the novels of Scott, Dumas, Verne, and Stevenson -- influence narratives not generally put in the same category: both psychoanalytical accounts of the psyche and novels by authors as diverse as George Eliot, Ursula Le Guin, Joseph Conrad, and W. G. Sebald. Analyses how adventure privileges masculinity but also reveals an extraordinary ambivalence towards it, since the truly seductive masculine figures in such fictions are always finally exiled from the centre of the social consensus. Five chapters, in particular, deal extensively with Scott's work (especially Waverley, Guy Mannering, and Old Mortality): 'Adventure and the Novel', '"The Importance of Elsewhere": Exotic Landscapes, Generative Spaces', 'A Curious Blankness: The Inept Hero', 'Rogue Males and Demons', and 'Women: Wild and Otherwise'.

This volume challenges the conventional view that Scott presents Scotland's future as belonging within the peace, prosperity, and progress of the United Kingdom and British Empire. Embedded within his Waverley Novels, D'Arcy argues, are dissonant discourses and discreet subtexts which inspire far more subversive readings than hitherto perceived. Despite Scott's apparently politically correct fiction and lifestyle, his fiction contains undetected and underrated manifestations of Scottish nationalism which not only invoke sharp criticism of both the Union and English imperial policy, but also reveal his passionate concern with the issues of Scotland's national identity, dignity, and independence.

Dawson challenges current views about the correlation between narrative structure, gender, and the governing psychological dilemma in four nineteenth-century British novels. The overarching argument is that the opening situation in a novel represents an implicit challenge facing not the obvious hero/heroine but an individual defined as the 'effective protagonist'. To illustrate his claim, Dawson pairs two sets of novels with unexpectedly comparable dilemmas: Ivanhoe with The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights with Silas Marner. In all four novels, the effective protagonist (in Ivanhoe's case, Cedric of Rotherwood) is an apparently minor figure whose crucial function in the ordering of the events has been overlooked. Rereading these well-known texts in relation to hitherto neglected characters uncovers startling new issues at their heart and demonstrates innovative ways of exploring both narrative and literary tradition.

Ann Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley were keen tourists and influential contributors to the discourse of Romantic tourism. This study examine how the shaping power of this discourse affected not only what they saw and felt on tour but also how they imagined their greatest novels. Defining both tour and novel as privileged spaces exempt from the routines of ordinary life, these authors effectively brought the tour into fiction and fiction into the tour. Dekker pays particularly close attention to the active commerce between British Romantic fiction, poetry, tour books, landscape painting, and book illustration (as exemplified by the collaboration between Scott and J. M. W. Turner).

This is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when Edinburgh rivaled London as a centre for literary and cultural innovation. It situates Scott as the central figure and shows how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and influence was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has long been taken as normative for British Romanticism. Duncan goes on to examine how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations - James Hogg and John Galt in particular - produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history.

An illustrated motor route through the Scott Country. Covering 70 miles from Kelso to Dryburgh Abbey, it largely follows the itinerary of Scott's own life. Includes a brief biographical sketch.

No study has explored the reason why such contending claims were made for poetry in the nineteenth century: that it was a panacea for the ills of the age or a pandemic at the heart of the social order. The former position was originally associated particularly with Scott's poetry; the latter with Byron's, while Tennyson assumed a position between the two. In exploring the logic behind these attributions, Felluga brings to light a host of previously unexplored medical and historical material while arguing that the medical rhetoric associated with all three authors served to undercut the surprising influence of these poets on the emergent mass market, on political ceremony, and on revolutionary radicalism.

The second chapter of this volume charts the lifelong interest of Sweden's greatest poet Gustaf Fröding (1860-1911) in the novels and poems of Scott. It analyses Fröding's debt to Scott in two of his earliest poetic efforts 'Claverhouse' (inspired by Old Mortality) and 'Abbotsford' (which grieves for the passing of Romanticism in the person of its 'greatest bard'). Echoes of Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and Waverley are traced in later poems, and Scott's view of Scottish history is shown to inform Fröding's own interpretation of the decline of the feudal nobility in Sweden. It is also through Scott that Fröding is introduced to perhaps his greatest influence, Robert Burns. The Scott-related poems are printed in the third chapter with English prose translations.

Amply illustrated biographical introduction seeking to heighten awareness of Scott's 'contribution to the cultural fabric of his country'.

Part of the Writers and their Work series published in association with the British Council, this volume is aimed at upper secondary and undergraduate students and their teachers in the UK and overseas, and is also designed for the general reader. It places Scott's work in the context of the social and political changes which affected late eighteenth-century Scotland. It gives a brief account of his life and charts his development as a poet and novelist, and seeks to justify his claims to attention as a major 19th-century novelist and seminal influence on later writers.

Taking literally Joanna Baillie’s claim that drama can promote social justice, the study explores how plays by Baillie, novels by Walter Scott (especially The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian, and Redgauntlet), and Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor address problems of capital punishment, poverty, and political participation. Baillie’s and Scott’s preoccupation with affective responses to criminals and beggars takes on new significance when situated next to nationalist efforts to use legal differences to promulgate an image of Scotland as a more compassionate society than England and when contrasted with Landor’s confidence in political claims-making to meet social needs. The study enlists analogies between the 'symbolic interaction' prompted by the selected writers and the concepts of 'symbolic interaction' still evolving from the sociology of Jane Addams, George Herbert Mead, and subsequent practitioners to recover a belief in the social efficacy of literature that was accepted during the pre-disciplinary Romantic era but contested throughout much of the twentieth century.

Japanese monograph on 'Historical novels by Walter Scott: History, Folklore, and Narrative in Scotland'.

This study places the novels of Tobias Smollett and Scott in two critical contexts: the rise of the human or social sciences from the mid-18th century; and the dominance of the novel by women writers throughout the 18th century. It argues that both authors, although often seen as quintessentially masculine, use the discourses of the feminine romance or domestic novel to figure authorial control over narrative structure. It suggests that they do so in order to combine Utopian plot resolutions which enact a nostalgic Tory ideology with an essentially deterministic account of history derived from the human sciences of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Published shortly after Douglas Jefferson's death in 2001, this volume argues that a rediscovery of Scott's works is long overdue. Scott, it claims, was 'largely responsible for great shifts of consciousness, changes of attitude to past and present, [and] a new sense of human community'. Consequently, Jefferson believes there can be few more serious and more common gaps in an English literary education than the omission of Scott. He goes on to discuss the novels on which a reappraisal should be based: The Heart of Midlothian, Waverley, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Redgauntlet.

This study explores the relationship of memory to writing in the 'long' eighteenth century in Scotland and America. It argues for Scott's adaptation and development of varieties of 'literary memory' from the philosophy and psychological theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, while distinguishing Scott's achievement from later Freudian theories and representations. It then analyses the ideological rejection of the cultural synthesis represented by Scott's "literary memory" by the New England romance writers, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This booklet argues that Scott's links with Kelso were more extensive and important than has been hitherto been acknowledged. It notes that Scott spent his summers at his uncle Captain Robert Scott’s house of Rosebank until he was almost thirty years of age, eventually inheriting the property in 1804. It charts Scott's relations with the Ballantyne Brothers, the establishment of the Ballantyne Press (with money obtained through the sale of Rosebank), and the publication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The final chapter records the fate (and sometimes destruction) of many of Kelso's Scott-related sites. A map of a 'Scott Trail' is included. The Kelso & District Amenity Society have kindly permitted the Walter Scott Digital Archive to provide a link to a PDF copy of the booklet.

This study challenges the long-held critical assumption that Spanish historical novelists slavishly imitated Scott. It shows that in their novels El doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente (1834) and Ni rey ni roque (1835), Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837) and Patricio de la Escosura (1807-1878) reject Scott's faith in historical progress. Larra's narrative method is underpinned by an essentially personal historical pessimism, while Escosura follows Spanish Enlightenment and Liberal thought in seeing post-16th-century Spanish history as a process of continual decline.

Russian-language text, published in Poland, on Dostoyevsky's transformation of motifs found in the works of Scott and Dickens.

Lampart argues that discussion of the 19th-century historical novel as a genre has concentrated too narrowly on the Scottian model. Analyzing Achim von Arnim's Die Kronenwächter, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, and Alfred de Vigny's Cinq-Mars, he argues that they propose autonomous, alternative models in conscious opposition to Scott. Only an awareness of this experimental background, Lampart argues, permits us to place later 20th-century variations on and parodies of the historical novel in a more precise literary-historical perspective.

This study shows how Romantic nationalism in Britain explored irony's potential as a powerful source of civic cohesion. The period's leading conservative voices, self-consciously non-English figures such as Burke, Scott (particularly in The Antiquary), and Carlyle, accentuated rather than disguised the anomalous character of Britain's identity, structure, and history. Their irony publicly fractured while upholding sentimental fictions of national wholeness. Britain's politics of deference, its reverence for tradition, and its celebration of productivity all became not only targets of irony but occasions for its development as a patriotic institution.

This study argues that, far from turning away from modernity to indulge a nostalgic vision of the past, Scott uses the past as means of exploring key problems in the modern world. Examining both narrative poems and novels, it explores the impact of the French revolution on attitudes to tradition, national heritage, historical change and modernity in the romantic period, considers how the experience of empire influenced ideas about civilized identity, and how ideas of progress could be used both to rationalise the violence of empire and to counteract demands for political reform. It also shows how current issues of debate - from relations between Western and Islamic cultures, to the political significance of the private conscience in a liberal society - are anticipated in the romantic era.

This study disputes the prevalent twentieth-century view that Scott provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future, pushing it 'out of history'. McCracken-Flesher argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, opened up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. She reads across Scott’s complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation’s nineteenth-century politics, to reveal an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Scott is presented as an author for post-Devolution Scotland's new times, inviting readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. For an online review by Penny Fielding in the Cambridge Quarterly, click here.

This study stresses the experimental, self-questioning nature of the historical novel in Scott's hands. His works are an often anguished meditation on the possibility of narrating events foreign to the reader's world, offering partial and consciously imperfect answers. Scott's conviction that all narrative is a compromise between the subjectivity of the narrator and the imagination of the reader is shared by the French writer Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808-89). Far from the magisterial certainties of Realism and Naturalism, Scott and Barbey believe that all narrative, whether fictional or factual, is filtered through the writer's gaze, but argue that to acknowledge the presence of that gaze is the most honest means to reach the truth.

Although not specifically devoted to Scott, this monograph contains more extended analyses of Scott's work than could be coherently dealt with under Articles and Chapters. Scott is identified as a major shaper of the imperial master narrative, helping to generate and sustain English acceptance of an Imperial British identity that is not exclusively English. His 'elite' or 'officer class' perspective is contrasted with the 'subaltern' narratives of James Hogg. Hogg's The Three Perils of Women (1823) is read as a powerful critique of Waverley challenging Scott's efforts to harness the Highlands to the imperial cause. The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818) is read as a response to Scott's Old Mortality vindicating the Covenanters from Scott's charge of fanaticism. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is seen to contain an attack on Scott's antiquarian attitude to rural literature. Satirical versions of Hogg are identified in Scott's own narrative in the figure of Gurth in Ivanhoe and the Wild Boar of the Ardennes in Quentin Durward. Where the emphasis is on the Hogg-Scott relationship, there are also readings of John Galt's Ringan Gilhaize (1823) as a riposte to Old Mortality and Stevenson's Kidnapped and Catriona as a reworking and refocussing of the Waverley narrative pattern to portray a recently conquered Highlands exploited by a corrupt government.

Charts the Italian reception of Ivanhoe via the novels, tales, illustrations, paintings, operas, ballets, and dramas that it inspired, showing how it helped define new tendencies in taste and new models of behaviour that became fundamental to Italian Romantic culture. Mancini's study highlights the novel's profound influence on the construction of a nascent Italian national identity.

This collection of essays (in German and English) examines the genesis and functional development of the historical novel from an interdisciplinary perspective. The opening section is devoted to Scott with chapters on Waverley and The Heart of Midlothian, Scott and Cervantes, Scott's immediate precursors, the relationship between the historical novel as a hybrid genre and contemporary historiography, nature and history, and a survey of recent Scott criticism. The remaining two sections discuss Scott's Victorian successors and offer a comparativist approach to the historical novel (including chapters on Scott and the German writers Benedikte Naubert and Theodor Fontane).

In 1823 Willibald Alexis passed off his novel Walladmor as a translation of a new work by Scott. Inspired by Alexis’s example, Wilhelm Hauff attributed his novel Der Mann im Mond to the popular German author Heinrich Clauren. Hauff was prosecuted, but this did not prevent another hitherto unknown author Karl Herloßsohn from publishing a further novel in Clauren’s name. Niehaus argues that this celebrated affair, which reflected both the growing industrialization of literature and the substantial absence of copyright legislation. raises fundamental questions concerning the nature of authorship. For an online review (in German) by Natalie Binczek in the Internationalen Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, click here.

This is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. Oliver discusses Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and Scott's own narrative poems, then goes on to consider Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Eastern Tales, and the late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. Oliver provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to both the poets and their readers during the early years of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.

Part of the series The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, this volume charts how Scott's historical fiction brought the ideas of Enlightenment to bear on the novel and created for the first time a sense of the past as a place where people thought, felt and dressed differently. His writing influenced Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dumas, Pushkin and many others; and Scott's interpretation of history was seized on by Romantic nationalists, particularly in Eastern Europe. This book gives for the first time a comprehensive account of the impact of Scott in Europe, from the early and highly influential translations of Defauconpret in France to the continued politicization and censorship of the novels in modern East Germany and Franco's Spain. Generic chapters examine Scott's presence in art and opera, two cultural forms which were deeply affected by his novels. Individual contributions are listed under Articles and Chapters on Sir Walter Scott Published in 2006. See Altshuller 2006, Bachleitner 2006, Barnaby 2006a, Barnaby 2006b, Bautz 2006, Durie 2006, García González and Toda 2006, Hubbard 2006, Maxwell 2006, Modrzewska 2006, Monnickendam 2006, Nielsen 2006, M. G. H. Pittock 2006b, Procházka 2006, Reitemeier 2006, Smolej 2006, Szaffner 2006, Szamosi 2006, Tambling 2006, Wright 2006.

Catalogue of an exhibition held 1 May-14 June 2002, Baillieu Library, Information Division, University of Melbourne.

In 1801 Scott was elected to the Forest Club, which had been formed in 1788 by a group of thirteen landowners residing within the Ettrick Forest. Closely connected through kinship and neighbourhood to many fellow members, Scott wrote about them with candour and pithiness in his Journal and Letters and, on occasions, depicted them as characters in his novels. The Club's history covers a period which includes the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the great Reform Bill of 1832, the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, the Great War, World War II, the introduction of the modern state and the Millennium. During this time while dress and ceremonial have remained much the same as in the eighteenth century, meeting times, mode of travel, eating and drinking habits have changed radically, as have members' lifestyles.

Reitemeier argues that the tendency to see Waverley as the first real historical novel has led critics to neglect Scott's debt to earlier German historical novels. Through a structural comparison between the various models of the German historical novel and those of Scott's English-speaking predecessors, he argues that Scott's own practice is closer to the former. In particular, Benedikte Naubert (1756-1819), whom Scott read in translation, is an important influence both in her ambition simultaneously to entertain and to educate, and in her use of the Vehme motif (which Scott uses, for example, in his 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein). For an online review (in German) by Johannes Süßmann in the Internationalen Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, click here.

Part of a series on great figures in Scottish history, the text is an adaptation of George Saintsbury's 1897 life of Scott. Besides the biographical narrative which includes a particularly full account of the financial crisis of 1826, it presents a critical assessment of Scott's major works.

This study discusses four aspects of Scott's literary treatment of law. Stechern first examines the feudal legal background to Ivanhoe with particular emphasis on inheritance law, hunting rights, and trial by ordeal. The following section turns to 17th- and 18th-century Scots Law, discussing infanticide (The Heart of Midlothian), entail (Waverley), insolvency (Guy Mannering, The Antiquary), and the poor laws (Guy Mannering). Stechern next analyses the impact of the Union on appellate procedure (The Bride of Lammermoor) and the law of high treason (Rob Roy, Waverley). The final chapter deals with the development of the office of Justice of the Peace in 18th-century Britain with reference to Rob Roy and Guy Mannering. The conclusion assesses Scott's view of the role of the advocate.

In 1998, the husband-and-wife team of William B. Todd and Ann Bowden (1924-2001) published the monumental Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History, 1796-1832, now established as the standard bibliography of Scott. This volume provides a catalogue of Scott holdings in their personal library.

A critical biography first published in 1980 as The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford University Press). Wilson resists attempts to divorce the life of 'the greatest single imaginative genius of the nineteenth century' from his work, arguing that both display the same genius, humaneness, and qualities of stoicism and sympathy. He equally opposes the view that Scott's talents were realized in only a few of his works, perceiving a coherent opus where other critics have seen discord, discontinuity, or decline.

Japanese study on 'History as Fiction: The Narrative Arts of Walter Scott'.