The Genius of Old Romance

2020 ◽  
pp. 263-308
Author(s):  
Helen Moore
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Historical Authenticity ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
Detailed Assessment ◽  
Walter Scott

In 1803 two new translations of Amadis were published: from French, by W. S. Rose, and from Spanish, by Robert Southey. It was through Southey’s editions of Amadis and Palmerin (1807), another Spanish romance, that Keats, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Hazlitt gained their knowledge of the genre. This chapter undertakes the first detailed consideration of Southey’s Amadis and demonstrates that it was heavily dependent upon Anthony Munday’s translation, to an extent not perceived at the time by the critics who praised Southey’s seemingly authentic Elizabethan diction. The translations of Southey and Rose were treated to a detailed assessment by Sir Walter Scott in the Edinburgh Review (1803) and exerted a considerable influence on Scott’s knowledge of medieval literary history and on his novels. The central themes of this chapter are the Romantic preoccupation with the medieval and Elizabethan periods, historical authenticity, and the recreation of the literary past.

Ancestral Piles

2018 ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Sean Moreland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Architectural Model ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.

Sir Walter Scott's Contributions to the English Vocabulary

PMLA ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
Paul Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Waverley Novels ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Walter Scott

It is rather surprising that the subject of Scott's influence on the English vocabulary, a subject which has excited the interest of many students of language, has not heretofore been carefully examined. That such an influence existed became apparent soon after Scott achieved popularity. Francis Jeffrey, in his review of Marmion in the Edinburgh Review of April 1808, remarks: “His genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk indeed of donjons, keeps, tabards, scutcheons, tressures, caps of maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides … ” This faintly petulant tone pervades the early remarks on Scott's contributions to the language. When the Waverley Novels appeared there seems to have been in the reviews considerable displeasure at the abundant intermixture of Lowland Scottish dialect, whence some words now very current have come to us. When The Monastery was published, a word-minded reviewer used one of Scott's innovations to solve to his own satisfaction the mystery of the Author of Waverley: “I believe that the author of ‘The Monastery’ and ‘Waverley’ has hitherto kept himself concealed, although these Works and several others … are attributed … to Sir Walter Scott, an opinion which is strengthened by the liberal employment in them of that feeble expression ‘he undid,‘ which so frequently disgraces the most beautiful passages in the Poems he avows.”

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