International Journal of Language & Literature

The Legacy of the Great Unknown: Sir Walter Scott as the Precursor of the Modern Novel
John Kuriakose

Abstract
This article illustrates how historical romance, the genre invented by Sir Walter Scott, with its great fictional and narrative potential, gave rise to the modern novel. Even though Scott’s genre ran into disrepute after a short stay, it was not simply dying out, but was permeating into the entire fictional fabric of the later period. For his fiction, Scott drew from the poets and philosophical historians of the past, assimilated the fictional world of romance with the realistic world of history, added to it a dramatic element and the fictional worlds of sentiment, tragedy, comedy, picaresque and satire, and thus created a highly composite fictional world. This new form of fiction influenced the novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth century’s all over the world, and gave rise to the modern novel.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v4n1a26