“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.

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.

The Distant Past as Mirror and Metaphor

2020 ◽  
pp. 108-134
Author(s):  
Diana R. Hallman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Grand Opera

Historical settings—especially those from the medieval and early modern periods—were central to the aesthetic of grand operas of the 1830s and 1840s. This historical aesthetic is clearly evident in the four works that are the subject of this chapter: La Reine de Chypre, Charles VI, La Juive and Les Huguenots. The enormous popularity of these historical settings reflected a more general fascination with the distant past among early nineteenth-century Europeans, a fascination that was also manifest in genres such as the historical novel. But the music and drama of grand opera also mirrored contemporary events, reflecting the tensions that were shaping the rapidly changing social and political dynamics of the present.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Price
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
The Impact

The historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break or change between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty explores this often neglected and misunderstood genre by reconstructing how conservatives and radicals fought through the medium of the historical past over the future of Britain. Aware of the events of the Civil War and 1688, witness to the American and French Revolutions, Scott’s precursors realized the dangers of absolutism, on the one hand, and political breakage, on the other. Interrogating the impact of commercial modernity, the works considered here do not adopt the familiar nineteenth-century Whig narrative of history as progress but instead imagine and reimagine the possibilities of transition. As such, they lay the groundwork for the British myth of political gradualism, while problematizing the rise of capital.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Greg Forter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Frederic Jameson ◽  
The Indian Ocean

The Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork and historical frame for the main chapters. It engages debates on materialist vs. poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial studies; on the utopian imagination; on expanding the black Atlantic frame of reference to include the Indian Ocean; on the Anglophone biases of postcolonial studies and how these implicate the discipline in contemporary capitalism; on the genesis of the historical novel in the nineteenth century; and on the cycles of finance capital to which the postcolonial inflection of historical fiction is a response. Theorists discussed include Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederic Jameson, and Georg Lukács.

scholarly journals História e imaginação histórica: a “Crônica do Descobrimento do Brasil” de Varnhagen e as narrativas de Alexandre Herculano * History and historical imagination: The Varnhagen’s “Crônica do Descobrimento do Brasil” and the Alexandre Herculano’s narratives

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 217
Author(s):  
MICHELLE FERNANDA TASCA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
Characteristic Features

<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>As fronteiras entre a História e a ficção possibilitaram a escrita de diversos textos oitocentistas que jogavam com essa dualidade conceitual. Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877) atuou intensamente nesse sentido, criando uma ficção histórica, característica do Romantismo português, ao trabalhar simultaneamente com objetos históricos e a imaginação. Ao mesmo tempo, percebemos na “Crônica do Descobrimento do Brasil” (1840) de Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816-1878) a presença de vários elementos característicos dessa Literatura desenvolvida por Herculano. A partir de uma leitura paralela dos textos de ambos os autores, procura-se perceber os caminhos tomados para a elaboração desse projeto literário oitocentista, que lançava as bases para um romance histórico lusitano, e a forma como tais elementos se desenvolveram nas obras em questão.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave:</strong> Imaginação Histórica – Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen – Alexandre Herculano.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract: </strong>The boundaries between history and fiction enabled the writing of many nineteenth-century texts that played with this conceptual dualism. Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877) worked intensively towards this direction, creating a historical fiction characteristic of Portuguese romanticism while working with historical objects and imagination. In the Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen’s (1816-1878) “Crônica do Descobrimento do Brasil” (1840) we also noticed the presence of several characteristic features of this literature developed by Herculano. By a parallel reading of the texts of both authors, we seek to understand the paths taken to the construction of the nineteenth-century literary project, which laid the foundation for a Lusitanian historical novel, and how these elements are developed in such works.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Historical Imagination – Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen – Alexandre Herculano.</p>

A False Start for the Classical-Historical Novel: Lockhart's Valerius and the Limits of Scott's Historicism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanwood S. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Waverley Novels ◽  
False Start ◽  
Oral Testimony

This essay examines the relationship between a popular but neglected subgenre of nineteenth-century historical fiction, the classical-historical novel, and the Waverley novels of Walter Scott. Using John Gibson Lockhart's Valerius; a Roman Story (1821), the first of the classical-historical novels to appear in the wake of the Waverley novels, as a test-case, the essay demonstrates how this subgenre highlights the limits of Scott's model for historical fiction. The essay first outlines the nature of Scott's favored brand of historicism, which it argues was a genealogical one centered on the oral testimony of witnesses to the past events in question (or their near-descendants). It then assesses Lockhart's attempt to adapt Scott's historicist model to his novel's second-century setting, and argues that for reasons having to do both with the temporal and cultural remoteness of that setting, and with the special status of late antiquity in the nineteenth century, Scott'smodel was not available to Lockhart and subsequent classical-historical novelists. Lockhart's novel thus stands as an instructive "false start" for the nineteenth-century classical-historical novel.

Scott Unbound

Serial Forms ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 69-106
Author(s):  
Clare Pettitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The North ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Performance Text

‘Scott Unbound’ shows how thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in a disaggregated, messy and material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help us to think differently about the immense cross-class popularity of Walter Scott’s work. Right from the start, Scott’s powerful Romantic presence as the literary author of books rested on ‘Scott’ as a multimedia phenomenon. Taking the nineteenth-century print serial seriously challenges assumptions about what a ‘book’ might be. By unbinding Scott’s work, this chapter disperses his texts and restores them to their original promiscuous sociability. The Romantic idea of the author is complicated through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the North’ (a.k.a. Walter Scott), and the phenomenon of ‘Scott’ in the early nineteenth century is produced by the generative possibilities of the serial more than has been previously recognized.

Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 631-653
Author(s):  
Joanne Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Literary Origins

This chapter argues for the interest and importance of Anglo-Saxonist novels when analysing questions of identity in Victorian Britain. Focusing on the nineteenth century’s two longest works of literary Anglo-Saxonism—Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1848 historical novel Harold and Charles Kingsley’s 1866 Hereward the Wake—it reveals that, contrary to contemporary opinion, these works do not assert, but rather question and investigate, simplistic notions of national identity. Both books are often dismissed as simply poor imitations of the earlier work of Sir Walter Scott. The chapter traces their literary origins to well before Scott; argues that the texts differ importantly from Scott’s work, in ways that can tell us much about the mid-nineteenth century; and reveals how the books intersect in important ways with other manifestations of Victorian medievalism, and have also had an important legacy in the medievalism of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.

Walter Scott and the Historical Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Classical Form ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
National Literatures

This chapter explores Walter Scott and the historical novel. Scott made the novel a modern epic form by making it national, and he made it national by making it historical. In doing so, he endowed the novel with the aura of philosophical dignity attached to history, the most prestigious of the Enlightenment human sciences, especially in Scotland. The historical novel became the ‘classical’ form of the novel as such throughout the nineteenth century, retaining popularity and prestige well after the major Victorian novelists had absorbed Scott's techniques for a historicism trained on modern conditions. The combination of history and Bildungsroman inaugurated in Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) would provide a model for aspiring national literatures across Continental Europe, its imperial frontiers, and its colonial satellites, well into the next century.

The English Middle Class and the Ideological Significance of Radicalism, 1760–1886

1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Political ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Political Spectrum

The noun “radical” as applied to reformers who held advanced views came into general use in the early nineteenth century. It was at first used in a derogatory sense, denoting, as Walter Scott wrote in 1819, “a set of blackguards.” However, it was taken up by the subjects of the intended abuse and quickly acquired a certain respectability—so much so that by 1830 one middle-class radical was recording that “the term Radical once employed as a name of low reproach, has found its way into high places, and is gone forth as the title of a class who glory in their designation.” Reformers from across the political spectrum were soon being designated “radical,” as can be seen from the application of the term to individuals as diverse in outlook as Lord Durham, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O'Brien.This eclecticism has led historians to pronounce the concept useless as a tool of historical analysis. If any tradition at all emerges from studies of English radicalism, then it is a tradition of liberal humanitarianism, a pattern of reform that is nonclass and nonideological. At best “radical” retains its original adjectival power of describing a root-and-branch reformer, an individual who worked to change quite substantially existing economic, political, or social structures by word or deed. But the evident contradictions and discontinuities in the so-called “radical tradition” have made historians balk at making further claims than these. This essay, however, is a provisional attempt to shift the focus away from the personalities and the specificities of reform movements in their peculiar conjunctural moments to the operation of radicalism as a powerful ideology that, far from being nonclass and nonideological and despite (or even possibly because of) its internal contradictions, has profoundly influenced class development and class relations.

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