Mrs Vachott's Haunting Memories: Walter Scott and the Female Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 472-489
Author(s):  
Zsuzsa Török
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
Walter Scott

scholarly journals ‘Too Frivolous to Interest the Public’?: Walter Scott, Richard Polwhele and Archipelagic Correspondence

Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Dafydd Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Public ◽  
Walter Scott

The Cornish writer Richard Polwhele and Sir Walter Scott corresponded on matters literary and social for a period of 25 years at the start of the nineteenth century without ever meeting. This article examines the published traces of this epistolary acquaintance and establishes what it might tell us about the lines of connection and dissemination it was possible to establish in Romantic Britain between what might otherwise be thought of as outlying areas of the nation. The article contributes to a number of recent archipelagic attempts to better understand the distributed or devolved nature of print culture within the nations and regions of Britain, in this case through a focus on the interconnections between them.

Writing the Nation: Historians and National Identities from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Geary
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Jules Michelet

Many nineteenth-century national historians, such as Alexandre Herculano, Cesare Balbo, François Guizot, Jules Michelet and Thomas Babington Macaulay, self-consciously created the deep past of their respective nations for receptive and enthusiastic national audiences. Influenced by the novels of Walter Scott, they wrote history as biography of the nation, an account of how that nation, composed of the best of all of its social strata, had come into existence. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, novelistic and professional approaches to history bifurcated, with the former reducing the scope of historical writing to investigations of highly specialised topics that have little resonance outside of academe and with a wider public. This chapter explores alternative ways for professional historians to engage with their societies and asks about the legacy of contemporary historical writing.

The National Drama

1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Core ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
At Home

The National Drama was a nineteenth-century dramatic genre unique to Scotland, dealing with Scottish characters in Scottish settings. It has been neglected this century by scholars of theatre and of Scottish history in general. This is a curious oversight given the importance of the National Drama in the development of the Scottish theatre and to the image of Scotland as a nation at home and abroad. The omission may have been the result of a too close association with Sir Walter Scott in the minds of many for whom the phrase ‘High Tory Romanticism’ summed up Scott's career and influence. But, the National Drama is worthy of fresh consideration because, although it is true that dramatizations of some of Scott's Scottish works formed the core of the national repertoire, the National Drama comprised a wide variety of pieces from a range of sources and its influence over the Scottish theatre was considerable.

Social and Moral Vision in Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Nicolaus C. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Episodic Nature ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Specific Influence

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

scholarly journals Historical Psychology, Utopian Dreams and Other Fool's Errands

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-207
Author(s):  
Nick Hubble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Walter Scott

The initial premise of Georg Lukács's The Historical Novel is well-known and can be found outlined in its opening sentence: “The historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at about the time of Napoleon's collapse (Scott's Waverley appeared in 1814)” (15). According to Lukács, the classical historical novel inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott was distinguished from what had preceded it by the conscious employment of a historical sense, already implicitly present in the realist fiction of Smollett and Fielding, combined with an understanding that progress is driven by the conflict of social forces.

scholarly journals Gothic Imaginations in Primo Ottocento Opera

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Chesney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Gaetano Donizetti ◽  
The North ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
The Way

<p>Connections between the Gothic and opera remain a subsidiary concern to most writers on the Gothic and on opera, if they are even addressed at all. In this study I wish to illuminate how the Gothic is presented both musically and visually on stage through the setting and thematic traits in select nineteenth-century Italian operas. A number of ideas are central to this aim. Firstly, that the ‘Gothic’ dimension of ‘Gothic opera’ is overtly represented through staging. The settings of many ‘Gothic operas’ in Scotland and England reveal the continental European fascination with northern Europe and its history. This stemmed from the influx of English and Scottish literature, most prominently the Ossian poems and the works of Walter Scott and Shakespeare. Consequently, Gothic scenes such as ruined medieval castles and rugged cliffs, masked by darkness or mist are enmeshed with a northern landscape. Tartan costuming also visually situates the Gothic scenes in Northern Europe. Furthermore, the use of musical mannerisms of Scotland and England, particularly in chorus scenes, reinforces this parallel between the Gothic and the north, linking music to the visible Gothic setting. Secondly, I will explore the way in which Gothic imaginings of both immaterial and physical incarnations of the supernatural move between the latent subconscious and conscious realisation. This is evident through the interplay between voice, orchestra and the singer’s corporeality and draws upon recent operatic studies concerning representation of ‘others’, dramatisation, and theatrical spaces. This second section positions women at the heart of the Gothic in opera, as the soprano is most often the character susceptible to other-worldly encounters and madness. The fundamental figure in this study is Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848). A number of his operas from the 1830s, especially Lucia di Lammermoor, emphasise how the Gothic may be revealed in opera. However, I conclude with a chapter on Macbeth, the ‘Gothic opera’ of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), for this work demonstrates how the configuration of the Gothic is developed in musical and dramatic terms and presents a case where the supernatural influence becomes all-empowered.</p>

Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-68
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Margaret Oliphant ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Walter Scott

This chapter argues that establishing an origin for what we now call ‘British realism’ or ‘the Irish novel’ is both an institutional and an anachronistic endeavour: the stories that we tell about novels are actually stories about the cultural institutions that study novels. Considering the formal and political divisions of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent alongside its changing critical reception, the chapter demonstrates how ‘British realism’ is an anachronistic formation and offers a new origin story where ‘British realism’ and ‘the Irish novel’ are not separate traditions or forms, but rather dynamically intertwined. Castle Rackrent, long thought to be an exemplary Irish novel precisely because it is not realist, develops realist contradictions that are taken up by later nineteenth-century Irish, Scottish and English novelists like Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope.

“Before Our Eyes”: Romantic Historical Fiction and the Apparitions of Reading

2013 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Image ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay reads the seminal historical fiction of Walter Scott in conjunction with the medical apparition discourse that flourished in the early nineteenth century. It argues that the tactics of the historical novel in this period are best understood through an “apparitional poetics” that attempts to solve the problem of the historical image.

Darsie Latimer’s “Little Solidity,” or the Case for Homosexuality in Scott’s Redgauntlet

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Incorvati
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Attachment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Character Type ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Walter Scott

Abstract By the early 1820s Walter Scott had been sharply criticized for conjuring up conspicuously passive heroes for his tales, but that criticism did not prevent him from presenting his reading public with his most singularly submissive character, Darsie Latimer, in 1824’s Redgauntlet. In fact, Scott devotes considerable energy in the novel to the delineation of a particular breed of unmanliness, linking Darsie’s inertia with his unusually strong emotional attachment to a schoolmate, his peculiar fascination with strong men, and his marked awkwardness around eligible women his own age. I argue that the coalescing of such features in one character warrants consideration of Darsie as a type of homosexual—that is, a character marked not only by an orientation of desire toward one’s own sex but also by a litany of character traits (among them, in this case, self-doubt, self-consciousness, and irresolution) which were typically associated with this non-normative desire. After considering evidence from this novel as well as from diary entries that reveal Scott’s views on sodomy and on wayward passions, I re-examine the Foucaultian contention that the homosexual was a late-nineteenth-century invention which transformed the sodomite into a species. Scott’s Redgauntlet gives us reason to believe that the conception of such a species was in place by the late Romantic period and that it was possible to consider this character type as distinct from the sodomite insofar as the former designated a disposition rather than the implication of sexual indulgence.

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