Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Towards the Modern Nation: The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, and Waverley
- Chapter 3 The Condition of England: Ivanhoe and Kenilworth
- Chapter 4 Western Identities and the Orient: Guy Mannering and The Talisman
- Chapter 5 Commerce, Civilisation, War, and the Highlands: Rob Roy and A Legend of the Wars of Montrose
- Chapter 6 Liberal Dilemmas: Scott and Covenanting Tradition: The Tale of Old Mortality and The Heart of Mid-Lothian
- Chapter 7 Liberal Dilemmas: Liberty or Alienation? The Bride of Lammermoor and Redgauntlet
- Chapter 8 Postscript
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Towards the Modern Nation: The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, and Waverley
- Chapter 3 The Condition of England: Ivanhoe and Kenilworth
- Chapter 4 Western Identities and the Orient: Guy Mannering and The Talisman
- Chapter 5 Commerce, Civilisation, War, and the Highlands: Rob Roy and A Legend of the Wars of Montrose
- Chapter 6 Liberal Dilemmas: Scott and Covenanting Tradition: The Tale of Old Mortality and The Heart of Mid-Lothian
- Chapter 7 Liberal Dilemmas: Liberty or Alienation? The Bride of Lammermoor and Redgauntlet
- Chapter 8 Postscript
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
He was a man of intensely conservative quality; he accepted, he accepted wilfully, the established social values about him; he had hardly a doubt in him of what was right and what was wrong, handsome or ungracious, just or mean. He saw events therefore as a play of individualities in a rigid frame of values never more to be questioned or permanently changed.
H. G. WellsWells's view of Scott finds a counterpart in some of the most authoritative readings of later twentieth-century critics. It is echoed, for example, in the landmark study by Alexander Welsh (1963), who argues that the experience of revolution and war ‘inflated the moral currency’ in Britain, so that ‘the felt triumph of stability and status’ obscured the rapid changes taking place in contemporary society. In this reading, Scott's fiction, like that of his contemporaries, ‘figured forth a vision of permanence and perpetuity’. Such accounts make Scott appear irrelevant to a modern age interested in change, instability, uncertainty, and diversity. In view of this it is perhaps not surprising that since Welsh's study appeared, the impression of certainty and permanence has been modified by a succession of critics who have uncovered a more doubtful, duplicitous, and sceptical Scott. The move begins tentatively, as when Robert C. Gordon and D. D. Devlin find a vein of Tory ‘pessimism’ in Scott's work, or when Peter Garside emphasises the ‘shifting perspectives and uncertain pictures’ through which Scott's fictional vision of the past appears.
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- Information
- Walter Scott and Modernity , pp. vii - xPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007