Scott's Novels Research Articles

Scott's Pageants: The Example of "Kenilworth"

KENILWORTH FALLS INTO THAT ABUNDANT CATEGORY OF SCOTT NOVELS forgotten by most twentieth-century readers, yet it is an important book in context both of Scott's career and of cultural history of novel. In some respects it marks apex of his popularity and influence. Brought out by Constable in January 1821 at literally unheard-of price of thirty-one shillings, it was first published in triple-decker format: a fact that in itself makes Kenilworth arguably most influential work of fiction of nineteenth century. Despite its high price, book sold briskly: 10,000o copies in first three weeks, another 3,000 in next month, a second edition within six weeks of first.(1) And if you read through contemporary reviews, what you find is one unending hymn of praise. In 1821 Author of Waverley was almost beyond criticism. Balzac called plot of Kenilworth the grandest, most complete, most extraordinary of Scott's achievements.(2) The novel's popularity lasted, too: Kenilworth was one of half-dozen Scott novels most often reprinted in nineteenth century. What did nineteenth-century readers respond to in Kenilworth that later readers have trouble discerning? The short answer, I believe, is spectacle. A fuller answer would involve an inquiry into way twentieth-century criticism has gone about writing history of novel. For all good work done over last twenty years on nineteenth-century fiction--and there has been a lot of it--when we come to write histories of form we continue too often to equate the novel with the of domestic realism. Such definitions exclude much more than they include, leaving vast tracts of prose narrative unaccounted for. If, as John Sutherland contends, map of nineteenth-century fiction has shrunk to Lilliputian dimensions,(3) that is partly because we remain enthralled by what we might call Jamesian theories of novel. By those criteria, narratives like Kenilworth simply don't signify, at least not in ways we have agreed to consider interesting. Kenilworth does offer a domestic drama in form of marital tribulations of Amy Robsart and Earl of Leicester, but it is just about as dull as it could be. If you trace reception history of this in nineteenth century, one thing you learn is that few readers have ever found Leicester-Robsart plot terribly compelling or have made mistake of considering it focus of narrative as a whole. Instead, what nineteenth-century readers responded to most enthusiastically in Kenilworth are precisely those aspects that are apt to seem least novelistic to us, namely elaborate spectacles surrounding figure of Queen Elizabeth. The entire narrative builds towards climactic revels at Leicester's castle in honor of Queen, and Scott's descriptions of them dominate last third of novel. For critics inclined to dislike or dismiss Scott, these sections of Kenilworth provide abundant ammunition. For one thing, they are full of egregious historical inaccuracies. For another thing, all that fictional pageantry and spectacle, all that wassailing and declaiming and striking of poses, all that gadzookery, somehow just doesn't seem sufficiently serious. Collectively we remain puritan enough in our sensibilities to insist that novels, if we are going to waste our time reading them, ought somehow to improve us. Kenilworth inaugurated--and this is another mark of its importance in history of novel--that thriving subgenre of Victorian fiction, lusty (and utterly unserious) Elizabethan costume drama, kind of thing Thomas Carlyle so roundly disapproved of in nineteenth century and Georg Lukacs disparaged in twentieth. The kind of thing serious literary critics have always tended to dismiss. Yet it is worth asking what cultural work such novels performed. As Nicola Watson has recently reminded us, Victorian iconography of Elizabeth was complex and diverse. …

The modern Scottish novel: narrative and the national imagination

In the last quarter century, Scottish novelists from Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and Allan Massie to James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy and Irvine Welsh have achieved significant international success. In The Modern Scottish Novel Cairns Craig shows how the work of such writers is constructed by a powerful national tradition in the novel, formed in the first decades of the century by writers such as John Buchan, Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn, a tradition whose distinctive thematic and formal concerns have shaped a unique contribution to the novel in English. Tracing the influence of Scotland's political and social history on its novelists from the 1890s to the 1990s, Craig argues that the Scottish novel has had to develop a highly specific set of formal techniques to cope with a situation in which the dominance of the English language is challenged by the survival of the rich inheritance of Scots speech, and in which the continuing effects of Calvinism imply that all fiction is necessarily deceitful, when not actually diabolic. Craig also sets the Scottish novel in the specific traditions of Scottish intellectual life - from J.G. Frazer to John Macmurray and R.D. Laing. The Modern Scottish Novel provides the intellectual and artistic context for some of the most exciting and challenging contemporary writing in English.

How Late It Was for England: James Kelman's Scottish Booker Prize

T _ here may be no better, nor more entertaining, site for examining the intersection of literature with issues of national identity in contemporary England than the loud buzz that annually surrounds the Booker Prize. Established in 1969 and awarded to the year's best novel, the prize has taken on the status of an institution, despite or indeed because of the fact that scarcely a year has passed without major controversy attending the award. Inches and inches of newspaper columns and letters-tothe-editor pages are devoted to the relative merits of prize contenders, winners, and judges, and the awards ceremony itself-a black-tie dinner at London's upmarket Guildhall-is televised live to a nationwide audience. Ladbrokes, a national high-street bookmaking chain (not usually concerned with this sort of books), sets odds on the shortlisted novels and takes bets on which will win. From an American perspective, the sheer quantity of public debate and the intensity of feelings aroused by the choice of Booker finalists and winners may seem unlikely, perhaps a little peculiar-but also enviably enthusiastic. However, all the Booker fuss probably indicates not so much a nation deeply impassioned about books and reading as, rather, the fact that debates over the state of the English novel have much to tell about a broader crisis in English culture-a crisis dwelling in both the adjective (English) and the noun (culture). Scottish novelist, critic, and

Tapestry With Images: Paul Scott's Raj Novels

Tapestry With Images: Paul Scott's Raj Novels

Extreme Events: Scott's Novels and Traumatic History

Extreme Events: Scott's Novels and Traumatic History

Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock , and: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (review)

REVIEWS 323 mode. Robertson rightly insists on the deliberateness with which the constructive involvement of the reader is required by the "strategies of uncertainty and disruption" (p. 70) that Scott shares with such predecessors as Walpole and Radcliffe. The third chapter is devoted to Scott's use of the frame narrative both in the playful introductory sections of his first editions and in the authorial repossession of his texts constituted by the final magnum opus edition of the Waverley novels. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 bring out the special strengths of Robertson's approach: her examination not only of neglected texts such as The Pirate and Peveril ofthe Peak, but of such familiar works as The Antiquary, The Heart ofMidlothian, and Redgauntlet, shows how richly productive a reading of Scott can be when full account is taken of his sophisticated and self-conscious deployment of the full repertoire of Gothic narrative strategies. Robertson argues convincingly that we must resist the kind of over-simplified and essentially reductive reading of Scott's texts that posits a recuperative model in which hero and reader alike share in an educational journey out of the Gothic world of romance and into the realm of "real" history: in Redgauntlet as in other of Scott's novels, "Gothic is increasingly validated as one of the ways in which a modern imagination like Darsie 's, or Scott's, or the early nineteenth-century reader's, can best perceive and represent the past and the experience of being persecuted by it" (p. 264). Jane Millgate University of Toronto Eliza Fenwick. Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock. Isobel Grundy, ed. Peterborough , Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994. 359pp. US$12.95. ISBN 1-55111-014-8. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, eds. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994. 371pp. US$9.95. ISBN 1-55111-038-5. These two books represent substantial additions to the list of possible texts for teachers of the novel or women's studies. Eliza Fenwick's Secresy, hitherto unavailable, gives us both an accomplished epistolary novel and a riveting tale. Shelley's Frankenstein is widely available and much taught; but by choosing the 1818 edition as copy text and placing it in an unusually broad cultural context, the editors have justified the publication ofyet another edition, and offered us an attractive alternative. Broadview Press's format is inviting—clearly printed on good paper, with distinctive nineteenth-century photographs on the covers, the books provide the physical pleasure that is so often a component of enticing one to pick up a book in the first place. Secresy provides much matter for reflection and discussion, and Isobel Grundy's introduction serves as a good starting place. She makes excellent use of the small amount of available biographical material, and in doing so, draws attention to the difficulties inherent in retrieving from the past a writer whose work has been largely forgotten. Fenwick was a friend of some of the foremost writers and thinkers of her day and she was closely connected to and influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays. Yet the opening paragraphs of the introduction are filled with uncertainties : we know her date and place of death, but Grundy can only say about her birth that "It seems she was born in Cornwall on 1 February 1766," and she must be even more vague about the date of her marriage to John Fenwick ("about 1788"). About her education, and how she met her husband, "nobody knows" (p. 7). 324 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:3 In the face of all this uncertainty, the accomplishment of the novel stands out all the more clearly; it is, as Grundy says, impossible to label, but a consideration of the many genres that it combines so effectively—"epistolary, gothic, sentimental, radical, novel of manners, or novel of social conscience" (p. 30)—would lead to much fruitful discussion. Fenwick handles her large cast of characters adeptly, drawing us into the troubles of Murden, Sibella, and Caroline, and the lies and betrayals of Montgomery with equal interest. The Gothic is genuinely present, physically by the ruin of the title, and in certain fearsome...

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels

Given that Sir Walter Scott was educated to practice law and that his interest in history focused on times of rebellion or revolution, it is perhaps not surprising that complex issues of right, justice, and power should figure prominently in his fiction. Bruce Beiderwell contends that Scott's novels contributed in a significant way to the general discourse on crime and punishment during his lifetime (1771-1832), which conincided with a vital period in the history of criminal law reform. Scott, a Tory, was on the side of authority, but his early novels in particular evince an intricate understanding of the moral and political limitations of laws especially those that sanctioned the state's authority to imprison and execute. In Waverley, Rob Roy, Old Mortality, and Hearth of Midlothian, says Beiderwell, Scott tests the power he upholds against its most unpleasant expression. These early novels provide a tentative yet wide-ranging commentary on the issues raised by scenes of punishment. In Scott's later fiction most notably Ivanhoe, Talisman and Redgauntlet - The critical tendencies of realism are dispelled by the powerful wishes that shape romance, writes Beiderwell. Moral ambiguity dissolves, as Scott gives voice to a vision in which victory is always associated with justice and punishment with guilt. Beiderwell argues that realism and romance function as opposing modes of response to the vexing problems raised by punishment. This division, he notes, follows Scott's own conventional understanding of genre and marks the critical and wishful tendencies of his work as well as of his surrounding political culture. Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels places the author of the Waverley novels in the context of his times and in so doing, claims a place for his in our own.

Walter Scott and Emily Brontë: The Rhetoric of Love

Was it Scott who fascinated the young Brontes with the themes, prominent in Charlotte's youthful writings, of love and faithlessness, adultery, rivalry, and revenge? Scott is and was admired more as the 'social historian'l of Scotland than as the author of romantic lovestories. The young Brontes may nevertheless have made Scott's heroes and heroines their literary standard and model for writing about sexual passion. In 1937/Florence Dry quoted Chapter 4 of The Black Dwaifto illustrate the resemblance between the Dwarfs thwarted passion and desire for vengeance and Heathcliffs.2 However, .resemblances to Wuthering Heights are found in other Scott novels, suggesting that Emily Bronte's love scenes and speeches do indeed derive, at least in part, from her reading of Scott; the novels which matter -in this relationship are tragedies which turn on sexual rivalry like The Black Dwarf, (a tragedy from the Dwarfs point of view), The Bride of Lammermoor, Kenilworth, The Surgeon's Daughter, and St Ronan's Well. In St Ronan's Well (1823), the only novel Scott set in nearcontemporary times, Clara's brother Mowbray, her true love, Tyrrel, and Lord Etherington, who has in the past tricked her into marriage, all behave in an oddly interchangeable way, as Emily Bronte's three male leads also do at times; Clara's reactions, including her half-mad state, are often recalled by Catherine's. On Tyrrel's reunion with his beloved Clara, for instance:

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels. Bruce Beiderwell.

<i>Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels</i>. Bruce Beiderwell.

: Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels. . Bruce Beiderwell. ; The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. . Ina Ferris.

: Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels. . Bruce Beiderwell. ; The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. . Ina Ferris.

Review: Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels., by Bruce Beiderwell and The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels., by Ina Ferris

Review: <i>Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels.</i>, by Bruce Beiderwell and <i>The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels.</i>, by Ina Ferris

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels (review)

290 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:3 Bruce Beiderwell. Power andPunishment in Scott's Novels. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xiii + 156pp. US$30.00. ISBN 0-8203-13513 . When Janet Adam Smith wrote an essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Redgauntlet to mark the Scott bicentenary in 1971, she subtitled it "The Man ofLaw's Tale," an epithet that could be applied to almost any of the Waverley novels, given the frequent presence of lawyers or of plot strategies that tum on issues of legality orjustice. Scott was, of course, born to the law—the son of a Writer-to-the-Signet, apprenticed as a solicitor at the age of fourteen, subsequently an advocate, then Clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and Sheriff, or chief magistrate, of the county of Selkirk. While a number of lawyers have written interestingly about legal points in Scott's fiction and most literary critics make passing reference to the law in discussing the Waverley novels, there has been no fullscale attempt to examine both the thematic and narratological dimensions of this topic until the publication of Bruce Beiderwell's thoughtful and informative survey. The great strengths of Beiderwell's study derive from his responsiveness to alt aspects of Scott's own fascination with the law together with his detailed knowledge of the legal debates that were current at the time the Waverley novels were being composed— an especially "active and vital period in the history of criminal law reform" (p. vii). Beiderwell's focus is not on the law of property or equity—the area that occupied Scott's day-to-day attention in the division of the Court of Session in which he served as Clerk— but on penal questions and on the criminal law seen in relation to larger issues of justice and power. Beiderwell has a learned but deft way of presenting key aspects of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century philosophical and legal debate about crime and its punishment, so that Scott's fiction is situated within the context of familiar texts by Hobbes and Locke on the one hand and of less familiar writings by Gilbert Stuart or Cesare Beccaria on the other. Readers with a mainly literary background are put comfortably in possession of the necessary theoretical and philosophical material without being subjected to any gratuitous display of the monograph writer's superior learning. With little time or space wasted, Beiderwell is able to show how, for example, understanding of Waverley is enhanced by setting it not only against Locke's Second Treatise but also against the views of William Paley and Martin Madan or the efforts of Samuel Romilly to enact some of Bentham's thinking in legislative form. The Heart of Midlothian is similarly illuminated by reference to Hegel and Kant, as well as to various Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, the necessary citations being managed with incisiveness and economy, not to mention a sharp-eyed ability to discriminate the genuinely pertinent from the merely impressive. In selecting examples for detailed study Beiderwell draws attention to two distinct groups: early novels whose narrative mode is essentially realistic—Waverley, Old Mortality , Rob Roy, and The Heart ofMidlothian—and a series of texts from the 1 820s whose dominant mode is that of romance—Ivanhoe, The Talisman, and, more controversially, Redgauntlet. He sees the early group as reflecting Scott's attempts to grapple directly with the kind of philosophical and practical issues that occupied the attention of legal reformers in the preceding decades and in his own day. The later novels, on the other hand, are seen as exhibiting a different kind of impulse, what Beiderwell characterizes as "a profound desire to make fiction correspond to wishes" (p. ix). It is in the discussion of this second group that the study is at its most innovative, demonstrating how concerns familiar from the early novels—the social containment of wrongdoing, the relationship between punishment, deterrence, and retribution, the difficulty of vindicating innocence—are translated into romance terms, enabling the man of law as narrator to deploy poetic justice to transcend the clumsier and less effective workings of that ordinary REVIEWS 291 human justice which expresses...

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels

Power and punishment in Scott's novels

Power and punishment in Scott's novels

Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller (review)

REVIEWS 85 scenes of sexual indeterminacy as those most vividly expressive of a lost principle of difference. From his libertine youth in the theatre to his sober latter days on the bench he is in search of it, but all he finds are conundrums, like Charlotte Charke playing the part of her own father Colley Cibber in The Historical Register, or Bosavern Penlez sitting in the ruins of Peter Woods's brothel bedizened with items of female underwear. Battestin scants the analysis of Fielding's reactions to these confusions (especially Penlez) because he wants to defend him from what he regards as ill-founded criticisms of weakness or caprice; in the meantime he is himself in hot pursuit of the proof of primal sin. But every crisis or inconsistency in Fielding's life is marked by blurred difference, from his difficulties with grieving to his trouble in reconciling the theory and practice of the law. Why is it, for example, that he needs so badly to weep like a woman when he wants to be impassive like a man; or why is his advocacy of a merciless system of justice contradicted by so many examples of his pity, especially towards women? The answer to these questions (assuming it could be found) would solve the mystery not of Fielding's sexual relations with his sister, but of his strangely enthusiastic reading of Clarissa, his fascination with the case of Elizabeth Canning, and his growing pessimism, which he tries to appease with reforms of the law that always fail to match his sense of injustice. Some time between 1743, when Fielding published his Senecan essay Of the Remedy ofAffliction, and 1751, when he jettisons the mie of reason in favour of mie by fear, a significant shift in his beliefs occurs which it would have been worthwhile identifying. Its results are to be seen in thefaux-naïveté of his Examples ofthe Interposition ofProvidence (1752), the strangely vehement defence of historical veracity in the Journal ( 1755), and of course in the generic as well as the doctrinal and sexual confusions ofAmelia (1751). Here I think Battestin could have expanded the insights ofTerry Castle, whose Masquerade and Civilization (1986) contains a superb chapter on the oxymoronic instabilities of gender and genre in Amelia, as well as John Bender's pathbreaking discussion of the connections between narrative structure and penology, which likewise concentrates on Fielding's last novel, in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987). As it is, they share Pat Rogers's fate, and are never mentioned at all. But their absence is compounded for by a wealth of material which is generously enough arrayed outside the restrictions of Martin Battestin's favourite theory to allow all his readers to interpret Fielding in the way that suits them best. Jonathan Lamb University of Auckland James Kerr. Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ix + 142pp. James Kerr's brief study consists of a general essay on "the historical novel and the production of the past" and three chapters dealing with five Scott novels: Waverley, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Redgauntlet. Neither the underlying subject—Scott's sense of the Scottish past and the fictional strategies by which he expresses and controls his understanding of history—nor the selection of illustrative texts is especially novel, and though the individual analyses offer fresh insights , the reader must first penetrate the densely written and somewhat elliptical opening essay before these become available. The basic position taken in the course of that essay is that "the modal tensions of the Waverley novels can be traced to Scott's conflicted sense of his own historical position" (p. 9), and there is a corresponding emphasis on ideological issues throughout the succeeding chapters. 86 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:1 In the first of these, devoted to Waverley, Kerr argues that Scott's first novel is a "fictive structure which permitted the projection and assimilation of a violent past" (p. 38), and the four other novels under consideration are viewed in the same valid but somewhat limiting terms. The chapter on Old Mortality thus opens with a detailed examination of the framework of...

Fool's Gold: The Highland Treasures of MacPherson's Ossian

James MacPherson was once a famous man, famous for translating Ossian's poems. If he is remembered now, it is for forging the Ossian with the emphasis on the forgery rather than the poetry; but mostly he is hardly remembered at all. If literary memory is founded on quality, then the turgid prose of these poems, with its thick syntax and grand, vague gestures, certainly encourages forgetfulness. But if we think of him as a literary event, as a writer who generated a great deal of interest (regardless of the source of that interest), then he seems more deserving of attention. The Ossian books figure in the education of all major writers through about 1830, most often as a fond memory of youth (just as Walter Scott's novels will for the later nineteenth century); Ossian gave to these youths that adventure, mystery and romance that is still, to some extent, the clearest association of the Scottish Highlands. To the literary scholar MacPherson offers an interesting example of the literary criminal, a kind of malefactor whose faults are at best vaguely defined. In MacPherson's case the difficulties are exacerbated by the genuine complexity of the facts, the source of the surprising duration and interest of the Ossianic Controversy, which lasted for almost fifty years. The definition of MacPherson's crime, and the delineation of the attractive (to the eighteenth century) qualities of the poems themselves, are parallel problems that lead to the same problematic place: the mysterious, unavailable Highlands, source of treasure and terror. To talk about the Ossian one must start by sorting through the odd collection of Highland materials that the poems bring with them, and then turn to the poetry itself.

The Popularity of Scott's Novels in France and Balzac's Illuslons perdues

The Popularity of Scott's Novels in France and Balzac's Illuslons perdues

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access Dramatisations of Scott's Novels: A Catalogue . By RICHARD FORD . Pp. xvi+52 . Oxford : Oxford Bibliographical Society (Occasional Papers no. 12), 1979 . Paperbound £5.00. DAVID HEWITT DAVID HEWITT Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 29, Issue 3, June 1982, Pages 246–247, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/29-3-246 Published: 01 June 1982

Towards a History of Colonial Administrators in Africa: Sources and Problems

Mr Kirk-Greene, who five years ago started work on the history of the modern British Colonial Service in Africa with the help of pilot research grants from the British Academy, the Rhodes Trust and the Hoover Institution, prefaced his talk by drawing attention to the vigorous current revival of interest in the colonial period. He cited the recent phenomenon of the “mini-industry” on the Raj - instancing the time given by television, radio, SOAS and the Imperial War Museum to Charles Allen's oral history project Plain Tales from the Raj and Raj: A Scrapbook; the success of Paul Scott's novels in the Ran Quartet, now being filmed; the India Office Library Hunt and Harrison project, The District Officer in India;