Exclusive Interiorities: Forgotten Novels and the Walter Scott Importance Trope

This paper studies how and why Walter Scott's Waverley Novels remain outside of the canon despite a burgeoning Scott studies subfield on the rise in the literary studies community. The article identifies the disconnect between Scott scholarship and Scott pedagogy as a way into a larger set of p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inELH Vol. 90; no. 4; pp. 1035 - 1068
Main Author Kozaczka, Adam
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2023
Subjects
19th century
Historicism
Literary studies
Modernism
Novels
Pedagogy
Prose
Reception (Artistic works)
Students
Teachers
Writing
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Summary:This paper studies how and why Walter Scott's Waverley Novels remain outside of the canon despite a burgeoning Scott studies subfield on the rise in the literary studies community. The article identifies the disconnect between Scott scholarship and Scott pedagogy as a way into a larger set of problems involving how late nineteenth-century and modernist aesthetics set enduring standards for "good writing." If we take Scott's de-canonization as a test case, we gain insight into how literary interiority—itself a carefully disguised construct—obfuscates and displaces older standards of writerly quality and learn how to find new, twenty-first-century applications for now forgotten novels.
ISSN:0013-8304
1080-6547
1080-6547
DOI:10.1353/elh.2023.a914015