Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, Sir Walter Scott - David Oberhelman (essay date 1991)


Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, Sir Walter Scott - David Oberhelman (essay date 1991)

David Oberhelman (essay date 1991)

SOURCE: Oberhelman, David. “Waverley, Genealogy, History: Scott's Romance of Fathers and Sons.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 15, no. 1 (1991): 29-47.

[In the following essay, Oberhelman reorients the debate concerning Scott's historicism in Waverley from a dialectic of history and romance to a thematic opposition of genealogy and teleological history.]

As the first English “historical novel,” Walter Scott's Waverley introduces a set of complicated genre distinctions that affect his entire corpus. “History” and “romance,” the two terms Scott problematizes in his presentation throughout the Waverley Chronicles, become the focal points in a critical polemic revolving around his general claim to “historicism”—to a coherent theory of history manifested in his novels.1 Indeed, the abrupt shift from one of those generic terms to the other in the third volume...

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