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"The well-chosen additional materials in this new edition of Waverley will prove illuminating to readers of Scott in numerous ways. Contemporaneous reviews reveal a wide range of perspectives on this historical novel; selections by Defoe and Swift express conflicting attitudes toward the Union of 1707. In addition, sections on the Rebellion of 1745 and on the customs of the Highlanders make available relevant but otherwise not easily available texts that further enrich this edition both for scholars of the novel and for student readers."-Frank Palmeri, University of Miami
"Walter Scott's Waverley is not an antique, but a revolutionary work that established the novel not just as an ideal type of history but as history itself: the psychology, the furnishings, the environment of the transition from militant to commercial society. Broadview's edition will help to reinstate the vivid creativeness of Scott in imagining a past and its peopleùnot to speak of his anticipation of multi-media only a few years before the photograph."-Christopher Harvie, historian and Member of the Scottish Parliament
Sir Walter Scott's first novel, Waverley enjoyed tremendous popularity upon its first publication. The novel is set during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which sought to restore Charles Edward Stuart to the British throne. It portrays the doomed rising from the perspective of the hero, Edward Waverley, who travels to Scotland and is drawn to the Jacobite cause by a clan chieftain, his beautiful daughter, and Charles Edward Stuart himself.
Appendices to this edition include material on the Jacobite Rebellion and related conflicts, Scottish folklore, and a broad selection of contemporary reviews of Waverley.
Susan Kubica Howard is Associate Professor of English at Duquesne University. She is the editor of the Broadview Editions of Frances Bumey's Evelina and Charlotte Lennox's Euphemia.
