ELIT 420 Sir Walter Scott, Scotland, and the Historical Novel

Walter Scott didn't just write novels, he largely invented the historical novel as a form and, in doing so, shaped how Europe (and the Scots themselves) came to imagine Scotland as a place with a romantic, recoverable past. The course works through four of his Jacobite novels alongside actual historiography and the Scottish painters who picked up his imagery, so you're constantly checking the fiction against the history it claims to represent. Expect weekly reading loads and three term papers rather than exams, which means the real work is learning to write critically about how literature manufactures national memory, useful background for anything later in the program touching nineteenth-century fiction, Romanticism, or nation-and-narrative theory.