Behind The Historical Novelist

Walt Scott (1771—1832) is one of the representative writers during the English Romantic Period and his Waverley (1814) is often considered to be his well-known novel. Compared with the former researches on Scott, which mainly put emphasis on the evolutionary rule of history and the essential characteristics of the age displayed in the novel, this thesis mainly makes an analysis on the internal social significance of this novel. This kind of social significance could be represented in several aspects, such as the spontaneous pursuit to the realistic depiction on the historical contents, the indirect reflection on the display of social background, the independent spirit and docile fate of the aristocratic protagonist Waverley, the revolutionary progress revealed from the social lower lever, etc. Meanwhile, this thesis also discusses the folk ballads of this novel which are traditionally instructive, the plot on ghost which possesses the tendency to conceal the historical progress, and the narrative style of the parenthesis which dyes the color of dialogism in this novel.