The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors. Harry E. Shaw.

1984 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Frank Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott, the Angel of Hadley, and American Historical Fiction

1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Dekker
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Self ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Waverley Novels ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Home Territory

From 1815 until about 1840 Sir Walter Scott was America's favorite novelist and much the most important model for her own budding fictionalists – Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Simms, Kennedy, Hawthorne, and others. Yet although fairly accurate estimates of Scott's American sales and circulation have been available for several decades, our understanding of his impact on American fiction has made only modest advances since the 1930s. While echoes of the Waverley novels can be discovered everywhere in American Romantic fiction, usually the louder they sound the more they signal merely the borrower's failure of inspiration or nerve. Scott's example was most fruitful where it was comparatively unobtrusive – partly because the best writers were best able thoroughly to adapt Scott's European scenes, characters, and conflicts to American experience, but also because at its best Scott's influence was of the self-effacing kind that helped Cooper, Hawthorne, and their contemporaries find their own true bent as American writers.On one occasion, however, Scott provoked a more revealing response by invading American home territory.

Ancestral Piles

2018 ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Sean Moreland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Architectural Model ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.

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