Negotiations of nostalgia: Strangeness and xenodochy in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe

Abstract

Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is on one level a novel about the futility of nostalgia, and is critical of characters who attempt to live in the past. Ivanhoe also evokes a powerful longing for ‘Olden Times’ through its representations of the medieval home. This article draws on Svetlana Boym's distinctions in The Future of Nostalgia between restorative and reflective nostalgias, and argues that Scott encourages his modern readers to reject the restorative nostalgic strategies employed by some of his characters and to entertain, if not embrace, the possibility that a reflectively nostalgic response is a feasible way to engage with a past that is at once drily antiquarian and viscerally horrific. The reflective-nostalgic figures of hospitality and home are used by Scott to engage his readers emotionally with the strange and with the idea of the stranger.