Waverley (novel) | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 27 pages of analysis & critique of Waverley (novel).

Waverley (novel) | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 27 pages of analysis & critique of Waverley (novel).
This section contains 7,055 words
(approx. 24 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by David Oberhelman

SOURCE: Oberhelman, David. “Waverley, Genealogy, History: Scott's Romance of Fathers and Sons.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 15, no. 1 (1991): 29-47.

In the following essay, Oberhelman reorients the debate concerning Scott's historicism in Waverley from a dialectic of history and romance to a thematic opposition of genealogy and teleological history.

As the first English “historical novel,” Walter Scott's Waverley introduces a set of complicated genre distinctions that affect his entire corpus. “History” and “romance,” the two terms Scott problematizes in his presentation throughout the Waverley Chronicles, become the focal points in a critical polemic revolving around his general claim to “historicism”—to a coherent theory of history manifested in his novels.1 Indeed, the abrupt shift from one of those generic terms to the other in the third volume of Waverley, “the romance of his life was ended, and … its real history had now commenced,”2 does not simplify the task of classification. Faced with...

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This section contains 7,055 words
(approx. 24 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by David Oberhelman
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Critical Essay by David Oberhelman from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.