Walter Scott and the Limits of Language

This study examines the extent to which Walter Scott's acute, and surprisingly modern, understanding of the relationship between discourse and meaning is grounded in an interrogation of language itself. While work by critics such as Ian Duncan, Penny Fielding and Catherine Jones demonstrates Scott's concern with the relationship between modes of narrative and the meanings which they offer, this book proposes that Scott's early interest in the relationship between form and meaning develops into a fundamental scepticism towards the potential of language to communicate experience reliably or authoritatively. It examines how these issues are manifested and interrogated from the early poetry to the late Reliquiae Trotcosienses, exploring the extent to which Scott's developing responses to these questions reflects and develops the eighteenth-century origins of the novel and prefigures the self-reflexive post-modern anxieties and liberations of contemporary fiction.

The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels has created a revived and vigorous interest in Walter Scott's fiction. It also offers new areas of information in relation to Scott's working methods, and the sources which lie behind and inform the Waverley texts. The critical interest generated by this edition (and a planned Edinburgh Edition of Scott's poetry) has created demand for new perspectives on his work. While recent books such as those by Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Julian D'Arcy have sought reinterpretation of Scott's work within a Scottish context, no work to date has explored the scholarship of the EEWN within a paradigm of modern critical theory to provide a comprehensive study of Scott's creative output. Walter Scott and the Limits of Language aims to do so, providing a reading of Scott's work which demonstrates previously neglected, but radical and suggestive epistemological dynamics and tensions within it.

Having worked for the Edinburgh Edition for many years (eleven as Research Fellow and since 2002 as General Editor) I have had unprecedented access to Scott's manuscripts. Immersion in his papers has given me a unique understanding of his creative processes and the experience of editing volumes for the edition has provided abundant evidence of the linguistic nuances, subtleties and ambiguities within them. As co-director of the Walter Scott Research Centre at the University of Aberdeen I have also had extensive opportunities to teach courses dedicated to Scott to both senior undergraduate and postgraduate students. I am therefore well qualified to complete a work on Scott which will enhance the reading experience of students, academics and the wider Scott community, and all those with an interest in the development of the novel