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Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow

Caroline McCracken-Flesher

4/5 ( ratings)

No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. If this statement sounds extreme, it echoes the tone that criticism of Scott and his culture has taken through the twentieth century. Scott is supposed to have provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future--that pushed it "out of history." Scotland has become a place so absorbed in nostalgia that it could not construct a politics for a changing world.

Possible Scotlands disagrees. It argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, also provided for a national future. They do not tell the story of a Scotland lost in time and lacking value. Instead they open up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. This book reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's nineteenth-century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Indeed, Scott invites readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. Scott's texts and his nation are alive in their constant retelling. Scott was an author for Scotland's new times.

Language: English

Pages: 240

Format: Kindle Edition

Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow

Caroline McCracken-Flesher

4/5 ( ratings)

No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. If this statement sounds extreme, it echoes the tone that criticism of Scott and his culture has taken through the twentieth century. Scott is supposed to have provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future--that pushed it "out of history." Scotland has become a place so absorbed in nostalgia that it could not construct a politics for a changing world.

Possible Scotlands disagrees. It argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, also provided for a national future. They do not tell the story of a Scotland lost in time and lacking value. Instead they open up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. This book reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's nineteenth-century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Indeed, Scott invites readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. Scott's texts and his nation are alive in their constant retelling. Scott was an author for Scotland's new times.

Language: English

Pages: 240

Format: Kindle Edition

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Kennedy & Boyd Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts

Mary Paterson or The Fatal Error

Sentimental Tommy: The Story of his Childhood

Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament

Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Bannockburn (Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures)

The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature

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