Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, Sir Walter Scott - Paul Hamilton (essay date 1994)


Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, Sir Walter Scott - Paul Hamilton (essay date 1994)

Paul Hamilton (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Hamilton, Paul. “Waverley: Scott's Romantic Narrative and Revolutionary Historiography.” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (winter 1994): 611-34.

[In the following essay, Hamilton assesses Scott's writing in Waverley as historicist, while illuminating Scott's ironic treatment of romanticism and his philosophical distance from revolutionary ideology in the work.]

More than most romantic novels, Scott's inaugural Waverley places itself within the contemporary scene of writing, reviewing its own possibilities quite openly—Gothic tale, Germanic romance, sentimental or fashionable upper-class yarn—and self-consciously pondering the problem of recovering a universal subject-matter in front of a modern audience sensitive to contemporary generic options. Like Friedrich Schlegel, Scott characterizes his audience as “this critical generation.” Like Wordsworth, he wishes to...

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