Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, Sir Walter Scott - Louise Z. Smith (essay date 1986)

Louise Z. Smith (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: Smith, Louise Z. “Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Anthropology in Scott's Waverley.” Studies in Scottish Literature 21 (1986): 43-52.

[In the following essay, Smith contends that Scott synthesized the modern historical novel in Waverley by grafting “dialectical rhetoric” and “anthropological historicism” to the existing elements of eighteenth-century fiction.]

'Tis forty-eight years since Georg Lukács invented in The Historical Novel (1937) the definition of historical fiction for modern readers. Scott invented the “entirely new”¹ historical novel, Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) for Lukács. But who invented it for Scott? And what is the nature of his invention? I think Scott's invention combined the elements familiar in eighteenth-century fiction with two closely related, newer elements: dialectical rhetoric and anthropological...

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