Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott - Alice Chandler (essay date 1975)
Alice Chandler (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: "Chivalry and Romance: Scott's Medieval Novels," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 14, Spring, 1975, pp. 185-200.
[In the essay that follows, Chandler argues that the romantic aspects of Ivanhoe, like Scott's other medieval novels, should be judged not by the standards of realism but of allegory.]
One of the recurrent elements in the Waverley Novels is the distinction Scott makes between the Highlands and the Lowlands. To enter the Highlands, as one critic has put it, is to cross a border "between what is and what might be, between reality and romance, between selfish causes and lost causes, the calculating present and the impulsive past."1 This analysis of the Scottish novels can also be applied to the medieval novels, except that in them there is no return at the end to ordinary life. While the medieval tales are far from the merely decorative pageantry that they have been...
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