Scott's Shadow
Subtitle: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Literature in History)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: December 3, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780691043838
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: 19th century; 19th Century English Literature; 19th Century Literature - History And Criticism; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Gothic & Romance; Semiotics & Theory; British Literature; 19th century; English fiction; History and criticism; Romanticism; Scotland; Scottish authors
Description: "Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life." "Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.