| Summary: | <p>This work explores Sir Walter Scott’s engagement with the classical past as it
emerges, in a selection of his so-called Scottish novels, in the form of creative
responses to stories and figures from the realms of literature, myth and history of
Greece and Rome.</p>
<p>It aims to offer a fresh look at an author that experiences a contradictory
state of being nowadays. On the one hand, Scott is in fact recognised as one of the
great masters of the art of fictional writing, as well as a touchstone for Scottish
national identity; yet, on the other one, he seems to be widely forgotten by the
general public. However, as this thesis contends, a series of circumstances in the
last several years, not least the increasing public focus on, and concern for, the
impact of initiatives and demands that have questioned, or renegotiated, the
British Union as a political entity, makes the questions that he posits throughout
his novels of significant relevance.</p>
<p>Building upon recent work that views the novelist against the background
of the classical tradition, this study intends to uncover the destabilising role that
Graeco-Roman elements play in eight of the Waverley novels, from the
theoretical basis of reader response criticism.</p>
<p>The following five chapters discuss the relevance, and extent to which,
Scott makes use of classical allusions and intertexts as a set of strategies for
shaping the characters’ background of thoughts and perceptions, as well as the
readers’ later response to their interpretation. While this approach clearly
enables him to address the educated elite of his audience, and to do it in the name
of a shared intergenerational lore, it also draws, more crucially, an area of
intersection between his Scottish and English readership. The resulting segment
of his readers is thus invited, on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border, to an act
of self-criticism that endorses alternative interpretations, together with dissonant
sentiments in, relation to the Act of Union and its outcomes.</p>
<p>The treatment of the topic proceeds in this thesis from extra-textual
factors to the internal dimensions of plot and characterisation. After an
introduction that situates the discussion within the current debate on Scott, the
departure point lies, in Chapter One, within a broader engagement with the
historical phenomena and cultural trends of Scott’s age. Chapter Two
foregrounds the incorporation of classical elements as it takes place within the
idea of Scottishness the author deploys in the novels here under scrutiny. In fact,
Graeco-Roman allusions and reappraisals result in the delineation of a negotiable
sense of membership and national identity that unfolds in opposition to an
invading power. Chapter Three covers a transitional dimension in its dealing with
classical models that intervene, at paratextual level, in the self-fashioning of the
anonymous narrative voice, by providing a spectrum of literary personae that
stand as a surrogate for Scott himself. Finally, issues of gender and sexuality are
discussed in the last two chapters, which foreground the role and impact of
classical precedents in negotiating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, selfcensorship and sublimation. Significantly, examples from ancient Greece and
Rome will pay a contribution in shedding light on the ways in which both the
discourse and knowledge about sexual attitudes and practices were articulated in
the early nineteenth-century.</p>
<p>Rather than confirming the long-standing notion of Scott as the
mouthpiece of pan-British propaganda –a view that has relegated him, for too
long, into the comfort-zone of political acquiescence– this work contends that the
author’s commitment to the classical past becomes the site for subtly channelling,
across his narratives, a counter-discourse of imperial rhetoric, well beyond the
celebratory framework of a shared progress.</p>
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