Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the first chapter of Waverley its anonymous author remarks:I must modestly admit I am too diffident of my own merit to place it in unnecessary opposition to preconceived associations: I have therefore, like a maiden knight with his white shield, assumed for my hero, WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil, excepting what the reader shall be hereafter pleased to affix to it.This ‘uncontaminated name’ has accumulated associations ever since, not all of them conducive to the kind of reading which Scott envisaged in 1814. Scott wrote his 26 subsequent novels (and several long tales) under various disguises, but the most constant was as the ‘Author of Waverley’, the officially faceless originator of the most widely read novels of the Romantic period. In consequence, the name came to indicate all the other novels which followed it, seeming to give Waverley a special defining place among Scott's works. Waverley is not, however, the start of a sequence; nor are the ‘Waverley Novels’ a special sub-category of Scott's prose fiction. These common assumptions, like so much else, separate modern readers’ first experience of the novel from that of readers in 1814, for whom it was an entirely independent venture, an unmarked page.The interpretation of Waverley offered here places it in a wider aesthetic, intellectual and historical context, then examines ... log in or subscribe to read full text