“A Thousand Peculiar and Varied Forms”: Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Exhuming the Vestigial Antique Body in Walter Scott's Caledonia
Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world 11 | 2015 Expressions of Environment in Euroamerican Culture / Antique Bodies in Nineteenth Century British Literature and Culture Exhuming the Vestigial Antique Body in Walter Scott's Caledonia Céline Sabiron Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/6694 DOI: 10.4000/miranda.6694 ISSN: 2108-6559 Publisher Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès Electronic reference Céline Sabiron, “Exhuming the Vestigial Antique Body in Walter Scott's Caledonia”, Miranda [Online], 11 | 2015, Online since 20 July 2015, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http:// journals.openedition.org/miranda/6694 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.6694 This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021. Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Exhuming the Vestigial Antique Body in Walter Scott's Caledonia 1 Exhuming the Vestigial Antique Body in Walter Scott's Caledonia Céline Sabiron 1 In Walter Scott's Border Antiquities of England and Scotland (1814-1817), the Anglo- Scottish border is portrayed as a backbone1 connecting the English and Scottish limbs of the British body, and lying there, almost lifeless, for two centuries since the Union of the Crowns: The frontier regions of most great kingdoms, while they retain that character, are unavoidably deficient in subjects for the antiquary. [...] The case becomes different, however, when, losing by conquest or by union their character as a frontier, scenes once the theatre of constant battle, inroad, defence, and retaliation, have been for two hundred years converted into the abode of peace and tranquillity [...]. -
Disfigurement and Disability: Walter Scott's Bodies Fiona Robertson Were I Conscious of Any Thing Peculiar in My Own Moral
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St Mary's University Open Research Archive Disfigurement and Disability: Walter Scott’s Bodies Fiona Robertson Were I conscious of any thing peculiar in my own moral character which could render such development [a moral lesson] necessary or useful, I would as readily consent to it as I would bequeath my body to dissection if the operation could tend to point out the nature and the means of curing any peculiar malady.1 This essay considers conflicts of corporeality in Walter Scott’s works, critical reception, and cultural status, drawing on recent scholarship on the physical in the Romantic Period and on considerations of disability in modern and contemporary poetics. Although Scott scholarship has said little about the significance of disability as something reconfigured – or ‘disfigured’ – in his writings, there is an increasing interest in the importance of the body in Scott’s work. This essay offers new directions in interpretation and scholarship by opening up several distinct, though interrelated, aspects of the corporeal in Scott. It seeks to demonstrate how many areas of Scott’s writing – in poetry and prose, and in autobiography – and of Scott’s critical and cultural standing, from Lockhart’s biography to the custodianship of his library at Abbotsford, bear testimony to a legacy of disfigurement and substitution. In the ‘Memoirs’ he began at Ashestiel in April 1808, Scott described himself as having been, in late adolescence, ‘rather disfigured than disabled’ by his lameness.2 Begun at his rented house near Galashiels when he was 36, in the year in which he published his recursive poem Marmion and extended his already considerable fame as a poet, the Ashestiel ‘Memoirs’ were continued in 1810-11 (that is, still before the move to Abbotsford), were revised and augmented in 1826, and ten years later were made public as the first chapter of John Gibson Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. -
Samuel Baker the University of Texas at Austin [email protected]
Samuel Baker The University of Texas at Austin [email protected] 5/13/2009 Scott’s Stoic Characters: Ethics, Sentiment, and Irony in The Antiquary, Guy Mannering, and “The Author of Waverley” Published in Modern Language Quarterly (2009) 70 (4): 443–471: Cite only from published version. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/10.1215/00267929-2009-011 Whomever one reads on the question, it seems that Walter Scott created “the classical form of the historical novel” by standing at a locus of contradiction. According to the most influential such accounts, Scott “portrayed objectively the ruination of past social formations, despite all his human sympathy for, and artistic sensitivity to, the splendid, heroic qualities which they contained”; he could accomplish such feats of mediation because he was “two men … both the prudent Briton and the passionate Scot."1 These accounts of Scott’s contradictory investments–by Georg Lukács and David Daiches, respectively–find an emblem in the title Virginia Woolf gave her essay on Scott's late-life journal. Referring to how Scott installed modern lighting at his pseudo- medieval estate, Woolf calls her piece “Gas at Abbotsford.”2 Such formulations became 1 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel [1937], Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, tr. (Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp.54-55; David Daiches, “Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist” [1951], in Literary Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), 92. 2 Virginia Woolf, “Gas at Abbotsford” [1940], in Collected Essays, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 1:128-138. touchstones for Scott criticism some decades ago.3 Many critics since have adopted the concept of a split Scott that, whatever their other differences, Lukács, Daiches, and Woolf share. -
University of Huddersfield Repository
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of Huddersfield Repository University of Huddersfield Repository Catterall, Stephen Book review: Class against Class: The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars, Matthew Worley, I. B. Tauris, 2002 Original Citation Catterall, Stephen (2006) Book review: Class against Class: The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars, Matthew Worley, I. B. Tauris, 2002. Manchester Region History Review, 17 (2). pp. 127-129. ISSN 0952-4320 This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/8268/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; • A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and • The content is not changed in any way. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ MRHR 17ii Maidment volume.qxd 24/07/2006 10:22 Page 127 LONG REVIEWS Matthew Worley Class against Class: The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars London: I. -
Landscaping Justice, Rebellion and Dynastic Failure in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley and Redgauntlet
Chapter 4 Landscaping Justice, Rebellion and Dynastic Failure in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley and Redgauntlet Our environment, conceived as landscape scenery, is fundamentally linked to our political landscape. kenneth r. olwig1 ⸪ There is no shortage of critical appraisal focused on Scott’s use of landscape to explore his thematic concerns in the Waverley Novels.2 As Jenni Calder points out, much of Scott’s popularity was the direct result of “his conjuring of a myth- ic history out of mountains, lochs and ruins”.3 Of course, Scott uses Highland 1 Kenneth R. Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), xxxii. 2 See, for example, James Buzard’s Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nine- teenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Penny Fielding’s ‘Curated Regions of the North: Art and Literature in the “Scottish Border” and the “Transpen- nine Corridor,”’ Visual Culture in Britain, 15 (2014), 159–72, and Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Yoon Sun Lee’s chapter on Scott in Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 74–104. See also the following recent commentary on Scott and his use of landscape: Chris Ewers. ‘Roads as Regions, Networks and Flows: Waverley and the “Periphery” of Romance,’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37 (2014), 97–112; E. García Díaz. ‘An Overview of Justice in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels: The Heart of Mid-Lothian.’ Oñati Socio-legal Series [online], 4 (2014), 1167–72; Anna Faktorovich. -
REFORMATIVE SYMPATHY in NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRIME FICTION Erica Mccrystal
Erica McCrystal 35 REFORMATIVE SYMPATHY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRIME FICTION Erica McCrystal (St. John’s University, New York) Abstract Nineteenth-century British crime novels whose heroes were criminals redefined criminality, alerting readers to the moral failures of the criminal justice system and arguing for institutional reform. My research on this topic begins with William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794) as a social reform project that exposes hypocrisy and inconsistency of governing institutions. I then assess how contemporary social criticism of crime novels contrasts with the authors’ reformative intentions. Critics argued the ‘Newgate novels’, like those of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth, glorified criminality and were therefore a danger to readers. However, Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) serve, like Caleb Williams, as social reform efforts to alert readers to the moral failings of the criminal justice and penal institutions. They do so, I argue, through the use of sympathy. By making the criminal the victim of a contradictory society, Godwin, Bulwer-Lytton, and Ainsworth draw upon the sympathies of imagined readers. I apply contemporary and modern notions of sympathy to the texts to demonstrate how the authors use sympathy to humanise the title characters in societies that have subjected them to baseless mechanisation. The emergence of crime fiction in nineteenth-century Britain provided readers with imaginative access to a criminal’s perspective and history as they conflicted with the criminal justice system and its punitive power. Novelists working within the genre re- examined criminality, morality, and justice, often delivering powerful social critiques of extant institutions. -
Sir Walter Scott's Templar Construct
Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. SIR WALTER SCOTT’S TEMPLAR CONSTRUCT – A STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY INFLUENCES ON HISTORICAL PERCEPTIONS. A THESIS PRESENTED IN FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY AT MASSEY UNIVERSITY, EXTRAMURAL, NEW ZEALAND. JANE HELEN WOODGER 2017 1 ABSTRACT Sir Walter Scott was a writer of historical fiction, but how accurate are his portrayals? The novels Ivanhoe and Talisman both feature Templars as the antagonists. Scott’s works display he had a fundamental knowledge of the Order and their fall. However, the novels are fiction, and the accuracy of some of the author’s depictions are questionable. As a result, the novels are more representative of events and thinking of the early nineteenth century than any other period. The main theme in both novels is the importance of unity and illustrating the destructive nature of any division. The protagonists unify under the banner of King Richard and the Templars pursue a course of independence. Scott’s works also helped to formulate notions of Scottish identity, Freemasonry (and their alleged forbearers the Templars) and Victorian behaviours. However, Scott’s image is only one of a long history of Templars featuring in literature over the centuries. Like Scott, the previous renditions of the Templars are more illustrations of the contemporary than historical accounts. One matter for unease in the early 1800s was religion and Catholic Emancipation. -
Biography Daniel F
Newsletter No 40 Autumn 2012 From the Chair SSAH Research Support Grants I hope you’re all enjoying the summer. This is The Scottish Society for Art History promotes always a busy time for us as we prepare the scholarship in the history of Scottish art and art papers for the next Journal, which this year will located in Scotland. To facilitate this, the SSAH focus on Scottish connections to and research on offers research support grants from £50 to £300 the Pre-Raphaelites. It will include, among to assist with research costs and travel expenses. others, Rossetti’s relationship with animals; the Applicants must be working at a post-graduate eco-socialism of William Morris; attitudes to the level or above and should either be resident in PRB by the Edinburgh Smashers Club; and the Scotland or doing research that necessitates Pre-Raphaelite influence on landscape painter travel to Scotland. Application deadlines: 30 George Wilson. We hope to have the journal November and 31 May. ready in time for our AGM, which this year will be in the splendidly re-designed Scottish To apply please send via e-mail: National Portrait Gallery on 8 December – please note the date in your diaries! a cover letter Another date to keep free if you can is 17 current curriculum vitae November, when we will be holding an a brief project description (300-500 words) afternoon conference at George Watson’s specifying how the grant will be used and College in Edinburgh looking at French artists how it relates to a broader research agenda who worked in Scotland in the late 18th and 19th a budget centuries, and the influence this had on their the name and e-mail address of one work – see below for more information. -
Waverley (Novel) - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
Waverley (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverley_(novel) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Waverley is an 1814 historical novel by Sir Walter Scott. Initially Waverley published anonymously in 1814 as Scott's first venture into prose fiction, Waverley is often regarded as the first historical novel. It became so popular that Scott's later novels were advertised as being "by the author of Waverley". His series of works on similar themes written during the same period have become collectively known as the "Waverley Novels". In 1815, Scott was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet "the author of Waverley". It is thought that at this meeting Scott persuaded George that as a Stuart prince he could claim to be a Jacobite Highland Chieftain, a claim that would be dramatised when George became King and visited Scotland.[1] Illustration to 1893 edition, by J. Pettie. Waverley Abbey is noted by English Heritage to be Sir Walter Scott's inspiration for this novel.[2] However, this was probably Author Sir Walter Scott not the case.[3] Country United Kingdom Language English, Lowland Scots, some Scottish Gaelic and French Series Waverley Novels 1 Plot introduction 2 Plot summary Genre(s) Historical novel 3 Characters Publisher Archibald Constable 4 Major themes 5 Allusions/references to other works Publication date 1814 6 Literary significance & criticism Followed by Guy Mannering 7 Allusions/references from other works 8 Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science 9 Miscellany 10 See also 11 References 12 External links Waverley is set during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which sought to restore the Stuart dynasty in the person of Charles Edward Stuart (or 'Bonnie Prince Charlie'). -
Long Reviews
University of Huddersfield Repository Catterall, Stephen Book review: Class against Class: The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars, Matthew Worley, I. B. Tauris, 2002 Original Citation Catterall, Stephen (2006) Book review: Class against Class: The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars, Matthew Worley, I. B. Tauris, 2002. Manchester Region History Review, 17 (2). pp. 127-129. ISSN 0952-4320 This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/8268/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; • A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and • The content is not changed in any way. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ MRHR 17ii Maidment volume.qxd 24/07/2006 10:22 Page 127 LONG REVIEWS Matthew Worley Class against Class: The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars London: I. B. Tauris, 2002, x + 352pp., h/b, ISBN 1–86064–747–2 Worley’s contribution is concerned with Worley lucidly develops this theme further the debate over the early development of in arguing that the debate within the the Communist Party of Great Britain CPGB reflected a wider debate within (CPGB) during the late 1920s and early international communism and led to a 1930s in a phase known as communism’s ‘leftward’ lurch which confirmed the split ‘Third Period’ following the Third with the Labour Party. -
Kenilworth Plot Summary and Themes.Pdf
KENILWORTH By Sir Walter Scott Plot introduction Kenilworth is apparently set in 1575, and centers on the secret marriage of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, and Amy Robsart, daughter of Sir Hugh Robsart. The tragic series of events begins when Amy flees her father and her betrothed, Tressilian, to marry the Earl. Amy passionately loves her husband, and the Earl loves her in return, but he is driven by ambition. He is courting the favour of Queen Elizabeth I, and only by keeping his marriage to Amy secret can he hope to rise to the height of power that he desires. At the end of the book, the queen finally discovers the truth, to the shame of the Earl. But the disclosure has come too late, for Amy has been murdered by the Earl's even more ambitious steward, Varney. Explanation of the novel's title The title refers to Dudley's Kenilworth Castle in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. The novel opens, however, at Cumnor Place, near Abingdonin Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). Plot summary Giles Gosling, the innkeeper, had just welcomed his scape-grace nephew Michael Lambourne on his return from Flanders. He invited the Cornishman, Tressilian, and other guests to drink with them. Lambourne made a wager he would obtain an introduction to a certain young lady under the steward Foster's charge at Cumnor Place, seat of the Earl of Leicester, and the Cornish stranger begged permission to accompany him. On arriving there Tressilian found that this lady was his former lady-love, Amy. He would have carried back to her home, but she refused; and as he was leaving he quarrelled with Richard Varney, the earl's squire, and might have taken his life had not Lambourne intervened. -
Ruins in Sir Walter Scott's Historical Novel:A Case of Diachronic
Ruins in Sir Walter Scott’s unknown reasons. The state of ruins clearly presents the distance from the past, while by appreciating ruins Historical Novel:A Case of one feels close to the bygone era. Architectural ruins Diachronic Interpretation of then present diametrical relationships between the past and the present: identification and distanciation, Architecture to use Paul Ricoeur’s terminology. This paper will trace this function of architecture and identifying its Rumiko Handa, University pedigree in the nineteenth century, in which literary authors, artists, and stage managers incorporated of Nebraska-Lincoln buildings’ depictions to feed the historical imagination. In particular, it will discuss the role architectural ruins Abstract played in Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel, referring In cultural studies of architecture the terms “place” and to his Kenilworth: A Romance. “performance” suggest a need to consider its particular scope that is not often discussed in Firstly, Scott used actual buildings as the setting, architectural history and criticism. As David restoring them to the time of the events. The specific Leatherbarrow observed in his recent book, names of the building and their parts and their spatial Architecture Oriented Otherwise, “So much writing relationships substantiated the story. Secondly, Scott about architecture tends to evaluate it on the basis of narrated the building’s history, referring to the its intentions: how closely it corresponds to the artistic associated individuals and events, or creating his own will of the designer, the technical skills of the builder, nomenclature to give a genealogical meaning. He also or whether it reflects the spirit of the place and time in described the building's ornamentations, both actual which it was built.” We do not require a reminder from and imagined, referring to the past.