The Literature Network - Resisting 'the spirit of innovation': the other historical novel and Jane Porter.(Critical essay)

Resisting 'the spirit of innovation': the other historical novel and Jane Porter.(Critical essay)

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From: The Modern Language Review
Date: 20060701
Author:Price, Fiona

Reviewing Joanna Baillie's Metrical Legends (1821), Thomas Carlyle remarks that 'The Fate of Wallace has been singularly bad, both in life and after it', his fame left 'to a vulgar rhymer':

We wish all this were remedied. Why does not the author of Waverley bestir himself? [...] THE WIZARD, if he liked, could image back to us the very form and pressure of those far off times, the very life and substance of the strong and busy spirits that adorned it. (1)

Since George Lukacs's reading of Walter Scott in The Historical Novel (1937), the representation of history as progress ...

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