Gendering Walter Scott

Gendering Walter Scott
Author: C.M. Jackson-Houlston
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2017-04-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131712958X

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott’s novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus—the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott’s novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott’s female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott’s ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

Gendering Walter Scott

Gendering Walter Scott
Author: C.M. Jackson-Houlston
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2017-04-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317129571

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott’s novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus—the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott’s novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott’s female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott’s ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

Gendering Walter Scott

Gendering Walter Scott
Author: C. M. Jackson-Houlston
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9780367880972

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott's novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus--the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott's novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott's female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott's ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

Gale Researcher Guide for: The Creation of the Historical Novel: Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels

Gale Researcher Guide for: The Creation of the Historical Novel: Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels
Author: Anna Fancett
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 14
Release:
Genre: Study Aids
ISBN: 1535854073

Gale Researcher Guide for: The Creation of the Historical Novel: Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Walter Scott and Fame

Walter Scott and Fame
Author: Robert Mayer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0198794827

Robert Mayer presents a study of correspondences between Walter Scott and socially and culturally diverse readers of his work in the English-speaking world in the early nineteenth century. He explores Scott's original constructions of authorship, reading strategies, and versions of fame in these revealing letters.

Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland

Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland
Author: Susan Oliver
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2021-08-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108831575

Demonstrates how Walter Scott, one of Romanticism's most globally influential authors, put Scotland's ecologies at the heart of nineteenth-century writing.

Mountaineering and British Romanticism

Mountaineering and British Romanticism
Author: Simon Bainbridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2020-04-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192599763

This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened 'mountaineering' in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognised, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity's evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with 25 images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering's power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms 'visual sovereignty'), the relationships between different types of 'mountaineers', and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence, and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.

Walter Scott and Fame

Walter Scott and Fame
Author: Robert Mayer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0192514113

Walter Scott and Fame is a study of correspondences between Scott and socially and culturally diverse readers of his work in the English-speaking world in the early nineteenth century. Examining authorship, reading, and fame, the book is based on extensive archival research, especially in the collection of letters to Scott in the National Library of Scotland. Robert Mayer demonstrates that in Scott's literary correspondence constructions of authorship, reading strategies, and versions of fame are posited, even theorized. Scott's reader-correspondents invest him with power but they also attempt to tap into or appropriate some of his authority. Scott's version of authorship sets him apart from important contemporaries like Wordsworth and Byron, who adhered, at least as Scott viewed the matter, to a rarefied conception of the writer as someone possessed of extraordinary power. The idea of the author put in place by Scott in dialogue with his readers establishes him as a powerful figure who is nevertheless subject to the will of his audience. Scott's literary correspondence also demonstrates that the reader can be a very powerful figure and that we should regard reading not just as the reception of texts but also as the apprehension of an author-function. Thus, Scott's correspondence makes it clear that the relationship between authors and readers is a dynamic, often fraught, connection, which needs to be understood in terms of the new culture of celebrity that emerged during Scott's working life. Along with Byron, the study shows, Scott was at the centre of this transformation.

Scott's Novels and the Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Place

Scott's Novels and the Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Place
Author: Dani Napton
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004352783

Counter-revolutionary or wary progressive? Critical apologist for the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties? What are the political and cultural significances of place when Scott represents the instabilities generated by the Union? Scott's Novels and the Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Place analyses Scott’s sophisticated, counter-revolutionary interpretation of Britain's past and present in relation to those questions. Exploring the diversity within Scott’s life and writings, as historian and political commentator, conservative committed to progress, Scotsman and Briton, lawyer and philosopher, this monograph focuses on how Scott portrays and analyses the evolution of the state through notions of place and landscape. It especially considers Scott’s response to revolution and rebellion, and his geopolitical perspective on the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian sovereignty.

Romanticism Gendered

Romanticism Gendered
Author: Andrea Fischerová
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527561763

This study focuses on the six writing men who have been throughout decades regarded as the alpha and omega of British Romanticism: Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth. It sees these men as a representative cohort of their time and examines their letters as results of a reading process. Although letters are usually seen as additional sources of reference in literary studies, in this book they are treated as the dominant information material: correspondence enables to reconsider British Romanticism on the basis of the epistolary communication of the first half of the nineteenth century. The target information from the letters are references to women writers and to their writings. A detailed analysis of the correspondence manages to answer the question whether male Romantics regarded writing women as “provoking” from time to time, as Duncan Wu assumes, and whether the gender identity of the woman author influenced the way male readers read her literary works. The examination of the correspondence thus takes a gendered perspective on British Romanticism. This approach to the target research data discloses a long list of almost 120 names of women writers from different periods and of different literary genres. Whereas the male readers in question have acquired a well-established, stable long-term position within literary history, the women were often marginalized, even forgotten. The study presents plentiful examples proving the discrepancies between what the twenty-first-century reader regards as the core of women’s Romantic literary tradition, and what the Romantic reader did. The following women writers are discussed in the study in detail: Susannah Centlivre, Anne Finch (Lady Winchelsea), Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie, Maria Edgeworth, Maria Jane Jewsbury, Catherine Grace Godwin, and Emmeline Fisher.