KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AUTHOR · FICTION · HISTORY
Sir Walter Scott
Also known as: Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, was a prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet, popular throughout Europe during his time. Scott has been said to be particularly associated with Toryism, though several passages in Tales of a Grandfather display a liberal, progressive and Unionist outlook on Scotland's history. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of The Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.
FEW have been in my secret while I was compiling these narratives, nor is it probable that they will ever become public during the life of their author.
— from The Bride of Lammermoor
Most acclaimed
The Bride of Lammermoor
This new edition of The Bride of Lammermoor restores the action to 1703, before the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 rather than after it, which is where Scott's revisions of 1830 placed it. At last the sense of instability and of impermanence which permeates the novel makes sense, for what was to come in the impending revolution. Love is doomed in this the most famous of Scott's plots. Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton are destroyed not just by the opposing political and religious allegiances of their families, but by the pervasive drive for power in a state where only power guarantees the ownership of real property. Yet the politics are only an aspect of a predetermining fate, seen in the symbols of the bull, the tower, the violated maiden, the raven, in the image of the revenging ancestor, in the traditional prophecies and in the second sight of the village witches. There is only safety in Lucy's contemptus mundi, seen in her song, "Look thou not on Beauty's charming", and when she commits herself to Edgar she is lost.
Selected poems
1990
Charles Olson, the poet who coined the word post-modern and helped shape the generation that would emerge under its mantle, is known for the immense range of his intellectual and poetic reach. Here, in this selection by Robert Creeley, Olson's personal friend and literary ally, is the more "intimate order" of the poet who sought to embrace all of history and human thought. Olson came from working-class immigrant roots in a Massachusetts mill town. A scholar of profound originality and vision, he worked for Roosevelt's administration during the war years, then at Black Mountain, the prototypical experimental college and enclave of avantgarde writers and artists. In 1957 he settled in Gloucester, a town on the shore north of Boston where he had spent summers as a child. It was Gloucester, with its richness of history and human use, that provided the ground of The Maximus Poems, begun as letters some years before and which over the next two decades grew into a masterwork of epic dimensions. From the more than three hundred poems making up The Maximus Poems and the comparable number in Olson's Collected Poems, Creeley's selection makes available for the first time an essential sampling of Olson's poetry. Included are paradigmatic early works like "The Kingfishers," which Guy Davenport called "the most modern of American poems, the most energetically influential text in the last thirty-five years," as well as familiar pieces from Maximus like "Maximus, to Gloucester" and "Celestial Evening." Also represented are less known poems, such as "The chain of memory is resurrection" and "The Lamp," works that reveal a more personal side of this major American poet. Together these poems demonstrate Olson's genius and grace, a poet as at home in Gloucester as in the cosmos, a reckoner with dreams and myths, and "Western man at the limit of himself."
Sir Walter Scott
The Antiquary, the third of the Waverley novels published in 1816 by Walter Scott, centres on the character of an antiquary: an amateur historian, archaeologist and collector of items of dubious antiquity. He is the eponymous character and for all practical purposes the hero, though the characters of Lovel and Isabella Wardour provide the conventional love interest. The Antiquary was Scott's own favourite of his novels, and is one of his most critically well-regarded works; H. J. C. Grierson, for example, wrote that "Not many, apart from Shakespeare, could write scenes in which truth and poetry, realism and romance, are more wonderfully presented." Scott wrote in an advertisement to the novel that his purpose in writing it, similar to that of his novels Waverley and Guy Mannering, was to document Scottish life of a certain period, in this case the last decade of the 18th century. The action can be located in July and August 1794. It is, in short, a novel of manners, and its theme is the influence of the past on the present.