The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe

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Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) had an immense impact throughout Europe. His historical fiction, which brought the ideas of Enlightenment to bear on the novel,created for the first time a sense of the past as a place where people thought, felt and dressed differently. His writing influenced Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dumas, Pushkin and many others; and Scott's interpretation of history was seized on by Romantic nationalists, particularly in Eastern Europe. This book gives for the first time a comprehensive account of the impact of Scott in Europe, from the early and highly influential translations of Defauconpret in France to the continued politicization and censorship of the novels in modern East Germany and Franco's Spain. Generic chapters examine Scott's presence in art and opera, two cultural forms which were deeply affected by his novels. This exciting collection of essays by an international team of leading scholars demonstrates the depth of Scott's impact on European translation, fiction and culture from 1814 to the present. It will be an indispensable research resource for Romanticists everywhere

Reviews

Title mention in the New Humanist, 2007
"...Specialists in the history of the novel or 19th-century fiction will want this book. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and researchers." M. E. Burnstein, CHOICE, April 2008, Vol. 45, No. -- M.E. Burnstein
Of the series: "...anyone who has read the Reception volumes will be aware of the rigorous interrogation of issues of nationality, Europeanism and literary cosmopolitanism that have added in such valuable ways to our understanding of a range of British writers within a wider international context." - Byron Journal
"...a fascinating and compelling book...a fine volume.Scott scholars, readers interested in reception studies, the history of the book or literature in translation should find it compulsive reading." - Byron Journal
"A valuable resource for Scott scholars - and for students of European culture in the last two centries" - Translation and Literature
'The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, edited by Murray Pittock, is a collection of essays by able people. One of them, Paul Barnaby, has provided a "timeline of the European reception" of Scott's works, based on the dates of early translations. The Germans were first to take him up, in 1810, with poems from Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, followed by Lady of the Lake five years later. In the meantime, there was poetry in Portuguese and French, but once Scott began to write fiction the translations came rapidly...'- Times Literary Supplement, August 2007 * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Murray Pittock is Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a prizewinner of that society and of the British Academy, as well as winning or being nominated or shortlisted for over ten other literary prizes. He is the author or editor of a number of prominent works on Jacobitism and Romanticism, including Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008, 2011), Robert Burns in Global Culture (2011) and Material Culture and Sedition: Treacherous, Objects, Secret Places (2013). He is currently editing the Scots Musical Museum in the AHRC Collected Burns edition.