Abstract
This essay considers the coexistence of nostalgia and critique of the past in the medievalist historical fictions of Walter Scott, including his verse romance Marmion, and the novels The Monastery, The Abbot, The Talisman, The Betrothed and Ivanhoe. It argues that in these texts Scott's anachronistic medievalism exhibits a ‘reflective nostalgia,’ which blends creative ‘nostalgic memory’ with ‘critical memory,’ and which stages the containment of private chivalric enthusiasm within a respect for political and military realities. Nevertheless, Scott's view of historical change as largely effected by military power also refuses to underwrite history as either providential or inherently progressive. His distinctive nostalgia asserts the lost potential of the past as a missing presence in the here and now.
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Notes
The same fearless, avoidable deaths occur in Marmion – ‘No thought was there of dastard flight;/Link’d in the serried phalanx tight,/Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,/As fearlessly and well’ (Scott, 1861, 354).
Kenneth, for instance, in The Talisman, is ‘[s]uperior in no respect to the ideas and manners of his time’ (Scott, 1905, 84).
See, The Talisman: ‘They [“the historians”] appear to have been ignorant of the existence of Edith of Plantagenet’ (Scott, 1905, 226 n1), and Marmion: ‘Unnamed by Holinshed or Hall,/He [Wilton] was the living soul of all’ (Scott, 1861, 360).
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Lynch, A. Nostalgia and critique: Walter Scott's ‘secret power’. Postmedieval 2, 201–215 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.5