Lexington Books
Pages: 380
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-0327-3 • Hardback • December 2017 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
978-1-4985-0329-7 • Paperback • November 2019 • $42.99 • (£33.00)
978-1-4985-0328-0 • eBook • December 2017 • $40.50 • (£31.00)
John McWilliams is College Professor of Humanities, Emeritus at Middlebury College.
A Legacy of Walter Scott: Historical Novels of Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Foreword: A Search for Synthesis
Introduction: Revolutions and Restorations
1. Metaphor: Controlling the Past
2. Scott: The Totality of History
3. Transforming the Neutral Ground
4. Waverer and Fanatic
5. Revolution and Battle Honor
6. Men under Trial: Revolutionary Justice
7. The Appeal of the Old Order: The Threat of the New
8. Women, Children & the Progressive Ending
9. New Directions
10. Conclusion: Scott’s Legacy: Flaubert and the Marxist Revolutionary Novel, 1848
Like Martha Bowden in Descendants of Waverley (CH, Mar'17, 54-3103), McWilliams (emer., Middlebury College) insists on a continuous tradition of historical fiction going back to Walter Scott. However, McWilliams also critiques the Marxist theory that has underpinned scholarship on historical fiction since György Lukács's The Historical Novel (Russian, 1937). On the one hand, revolution is prime material for historical novel settings; on the other, though the settings may be revolutionary, the genre is not. Drawing on fiction from the Americas, Britain, France, Italy, and Russia, McWilliams identifies several structural characteristics of the genre that generate narrative stability and “restoration”—not, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat. These include its preference for middle- and upper-class characters; its emphasis on “neutral ground” (an arena “contested by forces of the Old Order and the New, but possessed by neither”), within which the action unfolds; and its juxtaposition of the “wavering” hero, derived from Scott’s Waverley, with the “fanatics” the “eventual losers.” Except for Boris Pasternak’s downbeat Dr. Zhivago (1957), historical novels bring waverers to a chastened self-awareness that projects “hope for the cultural future” while eradicating the fanatics. An accessible, thought-provoking contribution that challenges some commonplaces in the field.
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— CHOICE
I find Revolution and the Historical Novel a very stimulating manuscript. It is not only well written—it is vigorously and subtly argued. It addresses issues of continuing importance and it offers many new insights into specific books. What it does with Gone with the Wind is especially impressive.
— Wayne Franklin, University of Connecticut