There Was a Writer, a Scottish Writer: Transcending Oppositions in Scott's Ivanhoe (1819)

• Autor(a) principal: Alarcão, Miguel
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/gaudiumsciendi.2016.2915

As Humberto Lopes once wrote, "(...) as far as cultural identities are concerned, frontiers can hardly said to be unsurpassable obstacles." (2003: 21; my translation) This idea is, I believe, a fruitful one when applied to Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), whose débutas a novelist we commemorated in 2014; if only because, as David Daiches put it, "Scott was two men: (...) both the prudent Briton and the passionate Scot." (1968: 36). We can only speculate on how he would balance today, were he alive, these two halves of his political citizenship and view, or react to, the long-standing claims for independence espoused and voiced by the Scottish National Party; claims tested in the September 2014referendum, two hundred years since the publication of Waverley (1814). Hardly a coincidence, surely; but that lies beyond the scope and purpose of the present paper. I will simply seek to show how social, political and cultural messages may have filtered into Ivanhoe(1819), Scott’s first published historical novel on the Middle Ages and on a specifically English theme.