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Abstract: At the turn of the 18th–19th centuries, the analytical function of the novel, aimed at describing the mores of contemporaries, extends to a new area – the historical past; and the novel itself, as it were, becomes one of the genres of historical research. It is not by chance that the historical type of novel appears in England, where the social novels of the 18th century gave impetus to the intensive development of the tradition of realistic depiction of life. For the first time, historical concreteness, which was lacking in historical prose and drama of the 17th–18th centuries, appears in the novels of W. Scott. The historical novel combines such new features as the angle of view from which private life is considered, the combination of personal and social motifs, the conceptual unity of fact and fiction, the type of the main character, the intertextuality, and the detailed nature of the narrative. The object of the study is the poetics of the artistic conception of W. Scott’s historical novels, defined by G. Lukacs as the “middle ground”. Scott’s choice of the “middle ground” as a method of constructing the composition is associated, firstly, with his idea of historical compromise, and secondly, with the epistemic uncertainty characteristic of the era of romanticism. It is seen as a reflection of the search for the universal connection between phenomena and as a striving towards totality and syntheticity typical of novel thinking. Scott’s novels are considered as a composite genre model that combines the features of an adventure, chivalric, gothic, and biographical novel, a Bildungsroman, a chronicle, etc. Their polycode structure is conditioned by the image of the protagonist: combining romantic and realistic features, this character appears in connection with the idea of the autonomy of the individual as a value which is developed in the era of modernity. The non-historical personality, put in the center of the narrative, performs the mediation function, compositionally connecting chronotopes and providing contact between the groups involved in the historical conflict; their travel, on the one hand, is associated with the process of self-cognition; on the other hand, it is anthropological in nature because it is associated with acquaintance with various representatives of society and movement through the historical and cultural landscape of the country. The author concludes that Scott’s novel is part of a large-scale process of novelization of artistic forms in European literature; it owes its birth to the transformation of ideas about a large narrative form: it focuses on an “average” personality, around which a world commensurate with this personality is assembled from different genre forms.

About the author(s) :

Olga A. Zhuravleva
Samara National Research University (Samara, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6390-5515

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 30.03.2023; date of publication: 30.06.2023

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