Examine the importance of sir Walter Scott in the history novels and literature
Answers
The historical novel is a literary genre that links strong dramatic plot lines and credible human psychology, within a setting characterized by specific historical details. The founder of this genre, which had a great impact on Romantic Europe, was Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), whose novels, starting with Waverley (1814), created a passion for the historical novel among readers and writers that remains strong up to this day. Scott’s main achievement was to get people to realize that history was not just a list of political and religious events, but the product of human decisions. He took the past of Scotland as his main subject and mixed it with imaginative adventures. He blended highly figurative language with dialect to portray real and living characters, who belong both to the aristocracy and the low, humble classes. He introduced a new concept of history, based on the lives of the ordinary people, rather than on those of kings and noblemen. His interpretation of English history offered him various examples of compromise between two extreme situations: the fight between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, which had given rise to a mixed people, the English and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which had marked the end of the struggles between the King and Parliament. He was interested in the moments when an important historical crisis, especially in Scottish history, caused personal problems in individuals or in groups
Ivanhoe (1820) and Waverley (1814), his most important works, respectively describe these conflicts. Most of his novels follow a pattern which has been called the ‘journey’: a traveler, that is, Ivanhoe or Waverley, moves from a safe situation inside an ethnic group, comes into contact with another ethnic group and shares their life for a time. In the end he will return from where he came with a different experience of life which will enable him to mediate between two rival groups.