Abstract:
In this talk I want to revisit the work of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), the father of the historical novel, from the framework of recent attempts in memory studies to develop a‘transnational’ approach and to move the study of memory ‘beyond methodological nationalism.’ This involves among other things a renewed interest in the fault lines between communities that result from migration and colonialism. The existence of such fault lines leads to the question how new memory narratives can emerge so as to ‘articulate’ or connect different groups who have been brought into relations of co-existence though they do not yet share a memory. With this in mind I show how Scott’s work, and in particular Ivanhoe (1819) can be read as an imaginative attempt to articulate new relations between conquerors and natives based on affiliation rather than descent. I then go on to show how Scott’s narrative of the emergence of modern England out of the Norman conquest was ‘transferred’ to other nations and mapped onto conditions there, and how in particular Ivanhoe worked multidirectionally in articulating identities in the United States on the eve of the Civil War and in its aftermath.