Beyond Beginning: Walter Scott's (Para)textualisation of Scottishness
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Margret Fetzer
Abstract
This article argues that the Scotland and Scottishness of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley and Rob Roy are beyond beginning in that they are significantly textualised, i.e. implicated in processes of reading and writing. Since these novels at the same time present reading and writing as closely and inseparably entangled with one another, it follows that any hierarchical relation or clear-cut opposition between Scottishness as opposed to Englishness is hard to maintain. Moreover, the question as to where England ends and Scotland starts is equally difficult to answer as that which concerns the beginnings of a Scott novel: his books abound in dedications, introductions and notes and hence obscure the distinction between paratext and primary material. Rather than mark any absolute or abrupt beginnings, Scott's strategies of (para)textualisation blur and obscure supposedly hard and fast cultural as well as aesthetic distinctions. Waverley and Rob Roy undermine colonial power binaries of English domination and Scottish subordination, which is why this essay encourages a reading of Scott from a postcolonial perspective.
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- Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies
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Articles in the same Issue
- Distance Learning: How Literature Teaches Ethics
- Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele
- Medusa's Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination
- Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der Englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi
- Beyond Beginning: Walter Scott's (Para)textualisation of Scottishness
- ‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity
- Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation: An Empirical Study of Word-family Integration in English and German
- Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English, ed. Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irené Wotherspoon
- Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology
- Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nick Higham
- The Old English Boethius. An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine with a chapter on the Metres by Mark Griffith and contributions by Rohini Jayatilaka
- László Sándor Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts
- Christoph Schubert, Raumkonstitution durch Sprache: Blickführung, Bildschemata und Kohäsion in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte
- Udo J. Hebel, Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies
- Civilizing America: Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture, ed. Dietmar Schloss
- John Wrighton, Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
- Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001, ed. Ingo Irsigler & Christoph Jürgensen; 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur: Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien, ed. Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller & Sascha Seiler
- Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies
- Eingegangene Schriften
