Sir Walter Scott's perceived “Scottishness” has been a handicap to the understanding of his work in the postwar world. The rise of an aestheticized vision of the Romantic period, combined with a focus on the Coleridgean imagination and the Lake Poets in general, rerouted Romantic criticism away from its origins in language, politics, and society and towards the realms of transcendent vision. Scott and Burns suffered more from this shift than other Romantic writers in the British Isles, and the situation was not relieved by a turn in the focus of Romantic criticism in the 1980s towards a historicist approach and enlarged canon. Whereas in the 1930s Scott's novels were being set at School Certificate for pupils in English schools, in the 1980s it was not unknown for English academics to believe that he was almost impenetrable to their undergraduates. Nor was the situation in Scotland better, despite the launch of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley novels in 1985, a project which initiated a new wave in the textual editing of Scotland's major authors. Signs of revival in North America have not yet significantly altered this picture.

Scott is commonly credited with inventing the historical novel. This is the case made by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel (1936-1937; English translation, 1962). Lukács argues that historical settings in novels that predate Scott (mostly gothic or quasi-gothic novels) do not acknowledge periodicity, which Scott achieves by portraying “the struggles and antagonisms of history by means of characters who always represent social trends and historical forces.”