Authorizing the Novel

Walter Scott’s historical novel achieved unprecedented success, and almost single-handedly propelled the novel as a genre into the literary field. A potent synthesis of history, romance, theory, and antiquarianism, the Waverley Novels rewrote contemporary modes of historical and national romance through a thematic of the heterogeneity of historical time. They answered to a new historical sensibility in a post-Revolutionary era of expanding readership; helped to forge a new British national identity; and were instrumental in reconfiguring literary culture for their time.