John Macrone (1809-1837) was a Scotsman who arrived in London around 1830 and became a publisher, in partnership with James Cochrane between January 1833 and August 1834, and independently between October 1834 and his death in September 1837. A friend of Dickens and Thackeray, he published Sketches by Boz and, posthumously, The Paris Sketch Book. One of his other projects was a life of Scott, which he began to write soon after the death of the novelist; but his book, chiefly remembered because Hogg wrote his Anecdotes of Scott for inclusion in it, fell under the displeasure of Lockhart, and was cancelled shortly before it was to have been published. A fragmentary manuscript, however, was recently discovered by the author of this thesis and has now been edited for the first time, together with a biographical study of Macrone, in which extensive use is made of previously unpublished and uncollected material.

Most critics of The Lord of the Rings correlate Tolkien's work to ancient texts, like Beowulf, the Elder Edda, and medieval romances. While the connection between these traditional materials and Tolkien is valid, it neglects a key feature of Tolkien's work and one of the author's desires, which was to fashion a sort of history that felt as real as any other old story. Moreover, it glosses over the rather obvious point that Tolkien is writing a novel, or at any rate a long work of prose fiction that owes a good deal to the novel tradition. Therefore, through careful attention to the formal textures of Tolkien's work, melding together both genre criticism and formal analysis (and with a sound understanding of literary history), I argue that Tolkien's work follows a more modern vein and aligns with the nineteenth-century historical novel, the genre pioneered by Sir Walter Scott. The projects of Tolkien and Scott parallel one another in many respects that deserve critical attention. This essay begins the discussion by addressing just one, somewhat surprising, point of comparison: the writers' use of poetry. I observe that Tolkien and Scott utilized poetry in similar ways, and I parse the poems into three distinct categories: low culture poems, high culture poems, and poems which straddle the divide between the two. All of this demonstrates how each piece of poetry, written in an antique style, saturates the texts with historic atmosphere and depth. This lends a sense of authenticity and realism to Scott's works, and later it buttresses Tolkien's attempts to foster "the dust of history" and create an illusion of authenticity and realism for Middle Earth's (imaginary) past.

Georg Lukács The Historical Novel continues to have a wide influence in Walter Scott criticism. However, Lukács theoretical insights into the role of genre in Scotts work remains underappreciated. This thesis takes for its departure Lukács summary that "the profound grasp of the historical factor in human life demands a dramatic concentration of the epic framework" (41). Lukács description of these two forms, dramatic and epic, is then applied in a reading of Scotts The Heart of Midlothian. Lukács terms offer a way of describing how Scotts fiction works, as the interplay of dramatic and epic motifs provide the aesthetic mediation for Midlothians social and political concerns. The chief problem raised through this reading is the role of genre in establishing a sense of historical necessity. In The Heart of Midlothian, the role of genre is made concrete in the novels gradual transition. Opening with dramatic social unrest, the novel shifts attention to the epic journey of Jeanie Deans and how her intervention re-establishes domestic and political harmony within the world of the novel. The interplay of dramatic and epic forms establishes a sense of internal necessity, as each major character organically finds his or her role in the overall course of progress. The thesis turns in its final chapter and conclusion to a resistance in Midlothian to the "dramatic concentration of the epic framework." Thus instead of solely applying Lukács categories to a Scott, the conclusion of the thesis turns Scott against Lukács. Midlothians conclusion evinces the resistance of Scott the storyteller to Scott the novelist of historical necessity, as the storyteller re-opens a sense of unforeseen possibility at the novels conclusion. The thesis concludes with a meditation on the ethical implications of Scotts competing narrative practices, that is, the dissonance between the historical novelist and the storyteller.

Georg Lukács The Historical Novel continues to have a wide influence in Walter Scott criticism. However, Lukács theoretical insights into the role of genre in Scotts work remains underappreciated. This thesis takes for its departure Lukács summary that "the profound grasp of the historical factor in human life demands a dramatic concentration of the epic framework" (41). Lukács description of these two forms, dramatic and epic, is then applied in a reading of Scotts The Heart of Midlothian. Lukács terms offer a way of describing how Scotts fiction works, as the interplay of dramatic and epic motifs provide the aesthetic mediation for Midlothians social and political concerns. The chief problem raised through this reading is the role of genre in establishing a sense of historical necessity. In The Heart of Midlothian, the role of genre is made concrete in the novels gradual transition. Opening with dramatic social unrest, the novel shifts attention to the epic journey of Jeanie Deans and how her intervention re-establishes domestic and political harmony within the world of the novel. The interplay of dramatic and epic forms establishes a sense of internal necessity, as each major character organically finds his or her role in the overall course of progress. The thesis turns in its final chapter and conclusion to a resistance in Midlothian to the "dramatic concentration of the epic framework." Thus instead of solely applying Lukács categories to a Scott, the conclusion of the thesis turns Scott against Lukács. Midlothians conclusion evinces the resistance of Scott the storyteller to Scott the novelist of historical necessity, as the storyteller re-opens a sense of unforeseen possibility at the novels conclusion. The thesis concludes with a meditation on the ethical implications of Scotts competing narrative practices, that is, the dissonance between the historical novelist and the storyteller.

Feeling forgotten charts a shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English literature that is structured on a crisis of memory. This shift consists in a movement towards a literary construction of aesthetic and moral self-forgetfulness that draws its intense power from an anxiety about human mortality and historical forgetting. Through analyses of texts that depict the need to overcome individual and cultural loss through a desire for oblivion, Feeling forgotten contends that the Romantic period gave birth to anti-mnemonic aesthetic in which the displacement of a perceived loss of the feeling of lived memories into various literary fictions preserves the past in such a way as to answer an unavoidable loss of feeling by asserting that the past, one's own and others, can be felt (again) in the complex affective experience found in reading about the past. In a more ambitious sense, Feeling forgotten attempts to point the way towards an understanding of Romantic and post-Romantic nostalgia as a strong rejection of its melancholic forbearers and as a response to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century self-forgetting. Indeed, the rejection of this more complex Romantic form of nostalgia, one in which the always frustrated attempt to inscribe forgetfulness itself into the text of memory is productive of the ongoing act of writing, would become the founding principle for later forms of nostalgia that seek to render forgetting as an act that resides outside the written text. Based on a reorientation of Charlotte Smith's poetic archive of feelings, which defines feeling as the failure of poetry to contain and defuse feelings themselves, and the passionate rationalism of William Godwin's early nineteenth century texts, in which self-analysis serves as both the generator and corruptor of the sympathetic feelings found in sentimental literature, Walter Scott's passive, amnesiac romances stage the fantasy of an evasion from the political and material significance of history. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1922. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. 78-82.

Thesis--University of Chicago, 1931. / "Private edition, distributes by the University of Chicago libraries." Lithographed.

Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since is an historical novel written by the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott which follows the adventures of Edward Waverley through the Scottish Highlands during the 1745–1746 Jacobite rebellion. It is, as has been suggested by previous research, a novel with a clear imperialistic bias and this essay adds to that discourse by applying the modern concept of the white savior complex. The white savior complex argues that white characters, in certain works, act as and are described as intelligent and moral saviors of non-white characters, who in turn are portrayed as unintelligent and immoral. Only by the actions of the white savior can they be saved. The complex is present mainly in the novel’s protagonist who drags the seemingly backwards society of the Scottish Highlands into a modern future as part of Great Brittan. This essay argues that the move from a backwards and archaic society to a modern and prosperous one would have been possible even without using the framework the white savior.

While authors have appropriated literary works for centuries, they have also appropriated historical settings and places well outside their own realities, creating new works in historical settings that reflect a new cultural purpose. The Restoration and eighteenth century are frequent subjects of popular formula-fiction romances due to the distinctive, easily replicated atmospheres; but the period has also inspired serious, traditional historical fiction and fictionalized biography as well as productions of novels from the period. This panel focuses on the long eighteenth century and the period’s intrigue for filmmakers, TV producers and audiences in a modern-day culture

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1939. / Typescript; in 178 and 4 leaves. Includes bibliographical references (p. [175]-178).