Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, Sir Walter Scott - Ina Ferris (essay date 1989)


Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, Sir Walter Scott - Ina Ferris (essay date 1989)

Ina Ferris (essay date 1989)

SOURCE: Ferris, Ina. “Re-Positioning the Novel: Waverley and the Gender of Fiction.” Studies in Romanticism 28, no. 2 (summer 1989): 291-301.

[In the following essay, Ferris observes that the publication of Waverley in 1814 prompted a critical reevaluation of the novel by associating the genre with seriousness, rationality, and the accurate depiction of history and culture.]

When Henry Brougham reviewed The History of the Maroons in the Edinburgh Review in 1803, he emphasized its incompetence as a history by linking it generically to the novel: “The style is thoroughly wretched, and the composition is precisely that of a novel.”1 Writing in the same review a quarter of a century later, Thomas Babington Macaulay also linked the genres of history and the novel—but to a very different end. Contemporary historians, Macaulay declares in a well-known passage, would do...

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