Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Shortened Forms of Reference
- Introduction: The ‘Poverty’ of Words
- 1 ‘Living in a World of Death’: Scott's Narrative Poems
- 2 Speaking my Language: Waverley, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary
- 3 ‘Dying Words and Last Confessions’: The Heart of Mid-Lothian
- 4 Lost in Translation: Ivanhoe, The Fortunes of Nigel and Peveril of the Peak
- 5 ‘Narrative Continued’: Redgauntlet and Chronicles of the Canongate
- 6 Last Words: Count Robert of Paris, Reliquiae Trotcosienses and Castle Dangerous
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Speaking my Language: Waverley, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Shortened Forms of Reference
- Introduction: The ‘Poverty’ of Words
- 1 ‘Living in a World of Death’: Scott's Narrative Poems
- 2 Speaking my Language: Waverley, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary
- 3 ‘Dying Words and Last Confessions’: The Heart of Mid-Lothian
- 4 Lost in Translation: Ivanhoe, The Fortunes of Nigel and Peveril of the Peak
- 5 ‘Narrative Continued’: Redgauntlet and Chronicles of the Canongate
- 6 Last Words: Count Robert of Paris, Reliquiae Trotcosienses and Castle Dangerous
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As has been shown in the previous chapter in Scott's early narrative poems he searches for a means to recover the past while simultaneously voicing a concern about poetry itself as a medium for locating and reinvigorating it. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in 1814, arguably at the height of his poetic career, he should turn to the newer form of the novel in order to explore the ways in which the past can be recovered and mediated to a modern audience through its discourses. This chapter will explore the ways in which, in his early fiction, Scott simultaneously looks back to his eighteenth-century predecessors and reinvents the novel form as he searches for a way to locate his stories of Scotland's past and personal identity within language.
If Scott's major poems were recognised as generically experimental at their time of publication, in the modern period much more has been made of the innovative nature of Scott's first novel Waverley. Ina Ferris, for example, notes:
A historically central and theoretically exemplary instance of generic innovation, the narratives of the Author of Waverley represent not simply the invention of a new novelistic form, the classical historical novel celebrated by Georg Lukács, but also a (less analyzed) crucial alteration of the generic hierarchy in place at the turn of the nineteenth century.
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- Information
- Walter Scott and the Limits of Language , pp. 75 - 100Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010