Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation, and World System
Ian Duncan, University of California
Volume 15, no. 1, October 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, something like a critical consensus has emerged regarding the function of the novel in the symbolic formation of national identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Great Britain, and, in particular, the influential role played in that formation by Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. The consensus takes its cue from Benedict Anderson’s account of the novel as one of the major cultural institutions that produces the “imagined community” of the modern nation. According to Anderson, the novel synchronizes the subjectivity of its readers with secular history and a calendrical order of “homogeneous, empty time,” by representing a temporal simultaneity across the diverse spaces and populations of the national territory. This imaginary standardization marches with the projects of political, legal, and economic rationalization that constitute modernization in other domains. The ideological power of Scott’s novels, following this account, lies in their explicit representation of modernization as a complex, overdetermined historical process, in which a set of political, legal, economic, and cultural transformations bear together on an inevitable outcome: here and now, the only real world, the commerce-based civil society of the post-1707 United Kingdom. Scott, the “father of the historical novel,” fully realizes the novel’s historical agenda by making it the novel’s theme.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Walter Scott” include:
Tending to the (National) Household: Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and “that happy commerce” of the Enlightenment
by NATASHA TESSONE (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation, and World System
by IAN DUNCAN (ECF 15.1, October 2002)
The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population
by CHARLOTTE SUSSMAN (ECF 15.1, October 2002)
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