• "Introduction," Walter Scott: New Interpretations

    Author(s):
    Susan Oliver (see profile)
    Date:
    2017
    Group(s):
    CLCS Romantic and 19th-Century, LLC English Romantic, LLC Scottish
    Subject(s):
    Scottish literature, Scotland
    Item Type:
    Article
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M60V61
    Abstract:
    Preview of "Introduction" to The Yearbook of English Studies 47 (2017), Walter Scott: New Interpretations. Just over half a century ago, Marxist critic Georg Lukács proposed that Walter Scott — writing more than a century earlier — was responsible for a new kind of historical narrative: readers, by identifying with everyday kinds of fictional characters, ‘could re-experience the social and human motives which led men [and women] to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality’.1 That argument, according to which fiction does much more than remember cultural history through telling tales, because in addition it conveys a sense of thought and feeling, should at least have ensured Scott a renewed place in Romantic studies. If Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads synthesized older (even ancient) poetry of feeling with narrative storytelling to make something bold and experimental, Scott did something similar with historical fiction in the form of the long narrative poem and in prose. All three of these first-generation Romantics believed in the power of remembering, during which the imagination could re-create feelings from the past, to improve their own and a future world.2 Wordsworth added that such recreated feeling, based in intense personal experience, ‘does itself actually exist in the mind’. Scott’s achievement, according to Lukács, was to recover socially embedded feeling from beyond the boundaries of personal experience because located in the deeper past, but still in such a way that individuals could experience it in their minds. Through a figurative form of time travel, then, people could relate more sympathetically to one another and establish a better society, responding to understanding produced by feelings as well as by thought . . . [for the full article see The Yearbook of English Studies 47 (2017) in hard copy or on JSTOR]
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.5699/yearenglstud.47.2017.0001
    Publisher:
    Modern Humanities Research Association
    Pub. Date:
    September 2017
    Journal:
    The Yearbook of English Studies. Volume title: Walter Scott: New Interpretations
    Volume:
    47
    Page Range:
    1 - 15
    ISSN:
    2222-4289
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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