Fiction Against History (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521364256)

Walter Scott was acutely conscious of the fictionality of his "historical" narratives. Assuming Scott's keen awareness of the problems of historical representation, James Kerr reads the Waverley novels as a grand fictional project constructed around the relationship between the language of fiction and the historical reality. Scott deliberately played fiction and history off against one another; and we can see throughout his novels a tension between the romancer, recasting the events of the past in accordance with recognizably literary logics, and the historian, presenting an accurate account of the past. This contradiction, reflected in Scott's generic mixture of romance and realism, remains unresolved, even in the most self-conscious of his works. It is in this interplay of fiction and history that Professor Kerr identifies the rich complexity of the Waverley novels.

Author: James Kerr
ISBN-10: 0521364256
ISBN-13: 9780521364256
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/28/1989
Pages: 156
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.50d