Fiction against History

Walter Scott was acutely conscious of the fictionality of his historical novels. Assuming Scott's keen awareness of the problems of historical representation, James Kerr reads the Waverley novels as a grand fictional project constructed around the relationship between the language of fiction and historical reality. Scott deliberately played fiction and history off against one another; and we can see throughout his novels a tension between the romancer, recasting the events of the past in accordance with recognisably literary logics, and the historian, presenting an accurate account of the past. This contradiction, reflected in Scott's generic mixture of romance and realism, remains unresolved, even in the most self-conscious of his works. It is in this interplay of fiction and history that Professor Kerr identifies the rich complexity of the Waverley novels.