Bibliography and Reference

Hayden, John O. ed. Scott: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. [Assembles criticism, reviews, and informal comment on Scott's works and related topics, from 1827 to 1883.]

Robertson, Fiona. "Walter Scott." In Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O'Neill. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. 221-45. [A recent bibliographical essay, particularly useful in identifying trends in criticism of Scott, followed by a list of texts and criticism.]

Rubenstein, Jill. Sir Walter Scott: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. [An annotated bibliography of secondary material on Scott from 1932 through 1978, organized by year, with informative annotations.]

---. Sir Walter Scott: An Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship and Criticism, 1975-1990. Occasional Papers 11. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1994. [Continues A Reference Guide to 1990.]

Scott, Sir Walter. Redgauntlet, ed. G. A. M. Wood and David Hewitt. Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, vol. 17. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. [A "clean" edition of the Waverley novels as they first appeared, without Scott's prefaces to the 1832 "Magnum Opus" edition, without editorial preface, and with notes, glossary, a textual essay, and textual notes at the end. While the purpose of this edition is to present the original Waverley novels, Redgauntlet is complicated by the changes Scott introduced in the 1827 and 1832 editions. Here the first edition is used with emendations from the manuscript and from the proofsheets in Scott's hand, and with other corrections of mistakes.]

Williams, Ioan, ed. Sir Walter Scott On Novelists and Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. [A collection of Scott's writings on the novel that includes fifteen essays from Lives of the Novelists (among them essays on Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Radcliffe, and Defoe), various essays and reviews (including Scott's review of Emma), and selections from the prefaces to his novels.]

Wood. G. A. M. "Scott's Continuing Revision: The Printed Texts of Redgauntlet." Bibliotheck 6 (1973): 121-98. [The 1824 edition of Redgauntlet contained many errors; Scott corrected some for the 1827 edition but made significant stylistic as well as accidental revisions for the 1832 edition.]

Biographies

Anderson, W. E. K., ed. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. [Scott's journal covers from late 1825 to early 1832, a period that saw his financial ruin, his gallant (and successful) efforts to pay his creditors, the death of Lady Scott, the composition of his Life of Napoleon and other works, the collapse of his health, and his journey to Italy. Possibly written with eventual publication in mind, the journal is an important record, with interesting observations of people and books. The edition is excellent in every respect.]

Daiches, David. Sir Walter Scott and his World. New York: Viking, 1971. [Well-illustrated biography that sets Scott's personality in the culture of his time and place and celebrates his sense of the past.]

Johnson, Edgar. Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1970. [Now the standard biography of Scott-sympathetic, detailed, thoroughly researched, and cogently written. Includes (unlike most biographies) important critical chapters on the works. Argues that Redgauntlet is "an intricate interweaving of related themes, and its complexity is reflected in its structure," which is compared to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Sees Darsie as alternatively guided by Geddes and Willie, stresses the importance of the interpolated stories, and describes the introduction of Charles Edward as "a daring experiment" that is "superbly realized and brilliantly justified."]

Lockhart, John Gibson. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 2^nd ed. 10 vols. Edinburgh, 1839. [Written by Scott's son-in-law, this biography reads Scott's life as a sequence of success, disaster, and redemption. But it needs substantial correction in light of modern scholarship. Edgar Johnson describes it as "seriously distorted by misunderstanding and bias and riddled with misstatements extending even beyond ignorance of the facts to deliberate invention and falsification." Most scholars accept Lockhart's suggestion that Saunders Fairford can be identified with Scott's father, Alan with Scott, and Darsie with his friend William Clerk.]

Wagenknecht, Edward. Sir Walter Scott. New York: Continuum, 1991. [General appreciation of Scott, with biographical chapters, chapters describing his poems and novels, and topical chapters that move between the man and his works. Sees Redgauntlet (briefly) as an anomalous but tightly-woven text. Sees Scott as a humane and honorable man.]

Criticism

Allen, Emily. "Remarking Territory: Redgauntlet and the Restoration of Sir Walter Scott." Studies in Romanticism 37.2 (Summer 1998): 163-82. [Redgauntlet reacts to Scott's anticipation of the failure of St. Ronan's Well, published the same year. It makes a self-conscious return to the masculine genre of the Waverley novels. "Redgauntlet narrates its own generic genealogy, retelling the story of the literary species at the level of the individual text." Sees Alan as feminized. Darcy seems like Pamela or Clarissa journalizing in captivity, or like Catherine Morland in her gothicized imagination. The transformation from Richardson's epistolary novels to Scott's historical fiction takes place on the levels of form and plot. Notable about the conclusion is "the overdetermined way it acts out what has come to be recognized as the cultural work of the Waverley novels" (i.e., mediating between heroic action and modern commerce). The story of the Redgauntlet family epitomizes Scottish history.]

Beiderwell, Bruce. "Scott's Redgauntlet as a Romance of Power." Studies in Romanticism 28. 2 (Summer 1989): 273-89. [Disagrees with those who see the ending of Redgauntlet as precarious. It is a romance, and romance "privileges broad, conservative sympathies over upsetting details." Campbell's leniency anticipates the ending of public executions in Britain by neither punishing nor dramatizing heroic treason.]

Brown, David. Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. [The chapter on Redgauntlet sees it (rather thinly) as a novel in which the contrast between past and present is represented by differences in generations but also by conflicts within the compromised characters. The novel is driven by the forceful will of Redgauntlet himself. Finds that "the unity of Redgauntlet appears to reside ultimately in Scott's own mental associations, and some of these are bound to remain obscure."]

Cockshut, A. O. J. The Achievement of Walter Scott. London: Collins, 1969. [In Redgauntlet, his last distinguished novel, Scott returns to the Jacobite rebellion to take up "the question of the meaning of defeat, of the power of memory and regret, of the spiritual value of adherence to a lost cause." The young characters (Darsie and Alan) provide a perspective on the old, whose memories are explored in the stories they tell. The most important of those stories are those of Pate-in Peril and Wandering Willie. These end in the appearance of Campbell at the Jacobite meeting. Our final view of Scott is that "the rich variety of the traditions that formed him is matched by the complexity within."]

Criscuola, Margaret M. "Constancy and Change: The Process of History in Scott's Redgauntlet." Studies in Scottish Literature 20 (1995): 123-36. [Redgauntlet exemplifies the general argument that Scott "beheld a common pattern within separate historical periods and formed his fiction as an imaginative exploitation of that pattern." In Redgauntlet "Scott's process of history" is seen in the successive tales and trials. Scott "represents both the codes which give human life through history its distinctive forms, and the changes which destroy those forms." The trial scenes pit the young protagonists who appeal to the law against the old rebels who claim independence of it, while "the legal process works as a metaphor for society, in which rebel and young stranger must find places." Scott represents a dynamic of individual values and social change.]

Cullinan, Mary. "History and Language in Scott's Redgauntlet." Studies in English Literature 18.4 (Autumn 1978): 659-75. [With its palimpsest of narrators and narrative modes, Redgauntlet shows that truth is a mental construct as well as independent reality, but language in the novel is often used to manipulate truth. This is most evident in the case of legal language. Even Darsie and Alan, though honest, mislead each other because they are incomplete-Alan rational, Darsie imaginative. The language of the Jacobite cause is deceptive and self-deceptive, and tales of the past, especially of the Redgauntlet family, are told through distorted narrations, although each supplies information necessary to the full story. "Willie's storytelling art, which creates truth out of legend, contrasts significantly with the language of the other speakers who employ literal or legal truths in efforts to communicate what is actually false." Although Geddes is plainspoken and truthful, his language is seen by Redgauntlet, Willie, and others (including several recent critics) as hypocritical. The theme of language and deception further joins with ambiguities concerning names and identities. "The use of false identifies reinforces the theme of social decay and linguistic corrosion." But history is corrupt, and modern society is as bad, in its own way, as the Jacobite past.]

Daiches, David. "Scott's Redgauntlet." In Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. 137-48. [Reprints From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinman, Jr. (1958) 46-59. Scott uses details from his own life to create a conflict between "the realistic, unromantic, modern world" and "a world of wild, romantic anachronism." The novel is weakened by unnecessarily conventional plot patterns and characters (Green Mantle and Nanty Ewart), but its strength is "its dramatic investigation, through the interrelations of the appropriate characters, of the validity and implications of different attitudes towards Scotland's past and present."]

Devlin, D. D. "Scott and Redgauntlet." Review of English Literature 401 (January 1963): 91-103. [The problem is how heroic values and qualities are to be understood and used after Culloden-not, as the example of Redgauntlet shows, by remaining in the past but by changing in terms of a future represented by the law (Fairford) and trade (Geddes). Peter Peebles parallels Redgauntlet.]

Garside, P. D. "Redgauntlet and the Topography of Progress." Southern Review (Adelaide) 10.2 (July 1997): 155-73. [Topography not only organizes the novel but is an important signal of significance. Alan's old and new Edinburgh are set against Darsie's Solway, with the contrast of Redgauntlet's feudal glen to Geddes's Augustan estate. Fairladies, with its stagnant decay, contrasts to the spontaneous development implied by Crackenthorp's inn, where Jacobitism seems strangely out of place. Argues that the real representative of honor in the modern world is Alan Fairford.]

Hart, Francis R. Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historical Survival. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1966. [Agrees with the early opinion that Redgauntlet is "an inferior kind of Waverley," because it "impressively essays and ultimately fails" to achieve a "total economy," despite the excellence of many parts. Its problem lies in the shift from Darsie to Alan in the second half of the novel and in Darsie's failure to achieve a defining action. But Scott's treatment of the problems of language and communication and their thematic implications are perceptively analyzed. Hart sees Geddes as Darsie's most reliable guide.]

Kerr, James. Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. [Historical novels represent not facts but ideology: "The novel is an evasion of history, an attempt to create a safe zone of language in which the forces of the real can be contained and managed." The chapter on Redgauntlet (102-23) argues that Scott's representation of a non-existent rebellion in that novel particularly emphasizes the fictive nature of history. The dialogue between Darsie and Alan may represent imagination and common sense, but Alan's legal practice itself resembles "the practice of storytelling," and Darsie learns of his past only through "twice-told tales." Redgauntlet is a counterpart of Scott the artist, who shares "a confidence in the revisioning power of his own fiction." Redgauntlet is "a self-reflecting romance about writing history."]

Lee, Yoon Sun. "Giants in the North: Douglas, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Scott's Redgauntlet." Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (Spring 2001): 109-21. [Argues that, reacting to the image of Scotland presented in the eighteenth-century play Douglas, Scott "suggests in his last Jacobite novel, Redgauntlet (1824), that the Scottish exercise of civic virtue turns on a highly equivocal nationalism that wishes both to disavow and conjure with the imagination of nationhood." The article appears in a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on Scott and nationalism.]

Maitzen, Rohan. "'By No Means an Improbable Fiction': Redgauntlet's Novel Historian." In Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. 121-33. [Reprints Studies in the Novel 25.2 (Summer 1993): 170-83. Redgauntlet and the various stories within it are about storytelling and have "the job of dismantling ingenuous assumptions about historiography," especially the assumption that "historical narratives are examples of simplistically mimetic or transparent representation." Redgauntlet intersects with twentieth-century theories of history.]

Nellist, Brian. "Narrative Modes in the Waverley Novels." In Literature of the Romantic Period 1750-1850, ed. R. T. Davies and B. C. Beatty. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976. [Sees Scott's fiction as a dialogue between two narrative modes-the romance and the novel. Finds those modes most clearly represented in Redgauntlet, "this most complex and subtle of Scott's narrations." The energy of Redgauntlet's romantic vision is supplied only by the force of his will, but the ordinary worlds of Geddes and Saunders Fairchild seem ironically undermined. "Wandering Willie's Tale" is "a model for the reader's attitude towards the whole work."]

Politi, Jina. "The Ideological Uses of Intertextuality: The Case of Redgauntlet. In Scott in Carnival: Selected papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt. Aberdeen: Association for Sottish Literary Studies, 1994. 345-57. [Uses the theory of M. M. Bakhtin to analyze the network of discourses in Redgauntlet. Other binary oppositions in the novel are held together by the opposition of the written to the oral, and Scott introduces "themes and motifs which belong to past literary forms" to show that they cannot represent present culture. In his search for his father, Darsie is aware that he should not mistake cultural signs for nature. His letters are playful and metafictional; he is a self-conscious author. The quest motif cannot organize "the universe of the action," in part because Darsie is swept up in Redgauntlet's quest. Alan's letters, unlike Darsie's, are monitory and reflect the ideology of the ruling class; his reason is obsessed with imagination. But Darsie's descriptions are accurate, especially his observation of Jacobite regression. Redgauntlet "forcibly carries into the novel's present a past which demands of it that it become its double," and seeks to force Darsie to act within his narrative. His presence leads Scott to a "mirroring strategy" or specularity that "organises the narrative universe of the oral tales." Hence the inner tales mirror the larger narrative. Redgauntlet's quest fails because the tales of the past cannot include the present. Nanty Ewart's tale reconciles the opposition between the written and the oral.]

Robertson, Fiona. Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. [The chapter on Redgauntlet, "'Ripping Up Auld Stories': Exhumation and the Gothic Imagination in Redgauntlet" (246-64) sees the image of exhumation as standing for the efforts to revive a dead Jacobite past and storytelling as an often fallacious repetition of that past; looks particularly at Darsie Latimer's effort to narrate his encounter with Redgauntlet and to account for his past, as he discovers it. Darsie embodies the Gothic imagination, but his "romantic perceptions are never invalidated."]

Shaw, Harry E. The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and his Successors. Ithaca: Cornell, 1983. [Historical novels are "works in which historical probability reaches a certain level of structural prominence," but they have a variety of forms and purposes. Scott's novels are compared to those of Thackeray, Balzac, Tolstoy, and others. Heroes of "conjunctive novels" such as Waverley and Old Mortality "have two main functions: their progress through the novel creates historical meaning of various kinds, and they also guide us in processing each novel as a whole, alerting us to the kind of issues each novel raises." Darsie performs these functions in Redgauntlet, which is "Scott's most elaborate defense of the play of historical imagination."]

Smith, Janet A. "Redgauntlet: The Man of Law's Tale." Times Literary Supplement (23 July 1971): 863-64. Sees Redgauntlet as a novel about the law, of which it takes a critical but ultimately positive view, and which it treats in a number of respects.]

Sosnoski, Patricia H. Reading Redgauntlet." Scottish Literary Journal 7.1 (May 1980): 145-54. [Applies Iser's reception theory to Redgauntlet by reading it in terms of its "gaps" (the unsupplied information that the reader must supply). The questions Sosnoski asks about these gaps are not very fruitful, but they lead to the conclusion that "history is created by an act of imagination" and hence is indeterminate.]

Walsh, Alexander. The Hero of the Waverley Novels. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. [Contrasts dark, passionate, lawless, and aggressive heroes to prudent, moral, and conventional heroes who are threatened by social disorder. The good guy always gets the girl.]

Weinstein, Mark A. "Law, History, and the Nightmare of Romance in Redgauntlet." In Scott and his Influence, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt. Occasional papers 6.. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1983. 140-48. [Law is an important element in Redgauntlet, where it functions as a counterweight to romance. For both Alan and Darsie the law breaks down, forcing reliance upon personal character and compromises with the lawless. But Scott loses control over romance, replacing it with "imaginative history."]

Wilkes, Joanne. "Scott's Use of Family History in Redgauntlet." Review of English Studies, n.s. 41.162 (May 1990): 200-11. [Redgauntlet takes on the name of Herries, which Saunders Fairford describes as a branch of the powerful family. There was in fact a Herries family which supported the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, and one branch lost its property and went into exile. The various ill deeds of the family make Hugh Redgauntlet look sweet. A related family, Herries-Crosbie (in the novel Provost Crosbie is married to a relative of Redgauntlet) preserves a family tradition of an inherited horseshoe mark as the result of a son trampled by his father in war. The history of the Geddes family, although not Quaker, also parallels the novel. Later members of the Herries family were quite successful citizens.]

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