The Afterlives of Walter Scott Memory on the Move

by Rigney, Ann

• ISBN13: 9780199644018
• ISBN10: 0199644012
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-05-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was a household name in the nineteenth century; once an immensely popular writer, he is now largely forgotten. This book explores how Scott's work became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why it no longer has this role. Ann Rigney breaks new ground in memory studies and the study of literary reception by examining the dynamics of cultural memory and the 'social life' of literarytexts across several generations and multiple media. She pays attention to the remediation of the Waverley novels as they travelled into painting, the theatre, and material culture, as well as to the role of 'Scott' as a memory site in the public sphere for a century after his death. Using a widerange of examples and supported by many illustrations, Rigney demonstrates how remembering Scott's work helped shape national and transnational identities up to World War One, and contributed to the emergence of the idea of an English-speaking world encompassing Scotland, the British Empire and the United States. Scott's work provided an imaginative resource for creating a collective relation to the past that was compatible with widespread mobility and social change; and that he thus forged apotent alliance between memory, literature, and identity that was eminently suited to modernizing. In the process he helped prepare his own obsolescence but his legacy continues in the widespread belief that showcasing the past is a condition for transcending it.

Author Biography

Ann Rigney was born in Dublin, educated at University College Dublin and the University of Toronto, and is currently professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 2005. She has published widely in the field of cultural memory, philosophy of history, and nineteenth-century historiography. Her books include The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge UP, 1990) and Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Cornell UP, 2011).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
1. Portable Monuments
2. Procreativity: remediation and Rob Roy
3. Re-scripting Ivanhoe
4. Re-enacting Ivanhoe
5. Locating memory: Abbotsford
6. Commemorating Scott: 'that imperial man'
7. How long was immortality?
Epilogue: Cultural memory, cultural amnesia
Notes
References
List of illustrations
Index of Names