SOURCE: Makdisi, Saree. “Colonial Space and the Colonization of Time in Scott's Waverley.” Studies in Romanticism 34, no. 2 (summer 1995): 155-87.

In the following essay, Makdisi explores the mythic geography of the Scottish Highlands in Waverley and the related temporal and spatial conflicts between England and this imagined Scotland. The critic closes by suggesting that Scott's novel contains an implied justification of Highland subjugation by the British.

A. Introductory

It would be only a small exaggeration, I think, to say that the images that many of us associate with the Scottish Highlands have their origins in Walter Scott's first novel, Waverley. Scott started writing Waverley in 1805, though he dropped it for several years and only completed it in 1814. The novel, which is set mostly in Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, not only presented to its nineteenth-century readers a romanticized view of the Jacobite rebels and their leader, Bonnie Prince...