scholarly journals "We Are Five-and-Forty": Meter and National Identity in Sir Walter Scott

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Jack Kerkering
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-113
Author(s):  
Tatyana Alexandrovna Fedorova

The paper discusses the influence of Walter Scotts historical novels on the formation of national identity of Scotland at the turn of the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In the current geopolitical situation, considering the growing wave of separatism, the relevance of the study of national identity formation process cannot be overemphasized. In the paper the author analyzes the historical preconditions of Scots national consciousness formation. The author also considers characteristics of historical and cultural development of the region. According to the author, James MacPherson and Bishop Percys works were equally important for national disunity overcoming in Scotland and Britain as a whole. Particular attention is drawn to the role of Sir Walter Scott in the process of national revival in Scotland. Such novels as Waverley, Puritans, and Rob Roy introduced the general public with the mental basis of the Scottish people. Having opened national character features and religious foundations of the Scottish worldview for a wide range of readers, the author awakened the interest of the British society to the heritage of Scotland, thereby laying the basis for a successful integration of the two peoples into a single nation. Sir Walter Scott managed to revive national prestige of Scotland that had fallen victim after the signing of Union in 1707.


Author(s):  
Joanne Parker

This chapter argues for the interest and importance of Anglo-Saxonist novels when analysing questions of identity in Victorian Britain. Focusing on the nineteenth century’s two longest works of literary Anglo-Saxonism—Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1848 historical novel Harold and Charles Kingsley’s 1866 Hereward the Wake—it reveals that, contrary to contemporary opinion, these works do not assert, but rather question and investigate, simplistic notions of national identity. Both books are often dismissed as simply poor imitations of the earlier work of Sir Walter Scott. The chapter traces their literary origins to well before Scott; argues that the texts differ importantly from Scott’s work, in ways that can tell us much about the mid-nineteenth century; and reveals how the books intersect in important ways with other manifestations of Victorian medievalism, and have also had an important legacy in the medievalism of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.


Author(s):  
Sean Moreland

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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document