Scott's Books is an approachable introduction to the Waverley Novels. Drawing on substantial research in Scott's intertextual sources, it offers a fresh approach to the existing readings where the thematic and theoretical are the norm. Avoiding jargon, and moving briskly, it tackles the vexed question of Scott's 'circumbendibus' style head on, suggesting that it is actually one of the most exciting aspects of his fiction: indeed, what Ian Duncan has called the 'elaborately literary narrative', at first sight a barrier, is in a sense what the novels are primarily 'about'. The book aims to show how inventive, witty, and entertaining Scott's richly allusive style is; how he keeps his varied readership on board with his own inexhaustible variety; and how he allows proponents of a wide range of positions to have their say, using a detached, ironic, but never cynical narrative voice to undermine the more rigid and inhumane rhetoric. The Introduction outlines this approach and sets the book in the context of earlier and current Scott criticism. It also deals with some practical issues, including forms of reference and the distinctive use of the term 'Authorial'. The four chapters are designed to zoom in progressively from the general to the particular. 'Resources' explores the printed material available to Scott in his library and gives an overview of the way he uses it in his fiction. 'Style' confronts objections to the 'circumbendibus' Scott and shows how his Ciceronian style with its penchant for polysyllables enables him to embrace a wide range of rhetoric relayed in a detached but not cynical Authorial voice. 'Strategies' explores how he keeps his very wide audience on board by a complex bonding between characters, readers, and Author, and stresses the extraordinary variety of exuberant inventiveness with which he handles intertextual allusions. 'Mottoes' examines the most remarkable of Scott's intertextual devices, the chapter epigraphs, bringing i

First published in 1987, this book is written for those who are encountering Wordsworth for the first time and for those familiar with his works that are at a loss to understand his reputation or why his work has impressed them. The strength of the author's approach is that it unravels the poet's true meaning and the process by which he all too frequently lost the voice of inspiration - working and reshaping his poems until the original freshness disappeared. It concentrates on helping the reader appreciate Wordsworth's distinctive and daring way with words and poetic structure. By showing Wordsworth's failures, the author demonstrates by contrast the achievements of his greatest works.

Scott's Books is an approachable introduction to the Waverley Novels. Drawing on substantial research in Scott's intertextual sources, it offers a fresh approach to the existing readings where the thematic and theoretical are the norm. Avoiding jargon, and moving briskly, it tackles the vexed question of Scott's 'circumbendibus' style head on, suggesting that it is actually one of the most exciting aspects of his fiction: indeed, what Ian Duncan has called the 'elaborately literary narrative', at first sight a barrier, is in a sense what the novels are primarily 'about'. The book aims to show how inventive, witty, and entertaining Scott's richly allusive style is; how he keeps his varied readership on board with his own inexhaustible variety; and how he allows proponents of a wide range of positions to have their say, using a detached, ironic, but never cynical narrative voice to undermine the more rigid and inhumane rhetoric. The Introduction outlines this approach and sets the book in the context of earlier and current Scott criticism. It also deals with some practical issues, including forms of reference and the distinctive use of the term 'Authorial'. The four chapters are designed to zoom in progressively from the general to the particular. 'Resources' explores the printed material available to Scott in his library and gives an overview of the way he uses it in his fiction. 'Style' confronts objections to the 'circumbendibus' Scott and shows how his Ciceronian style with its penchant for polysyllables enables him to embrace a wide range of rhetoric relayed in a detached but not cynical Authorial voice. 'Strategies' explores how he keeps his very wide audience on board by a complex bonding between characters, readers, and Author, and stresses the extraordinary variety of exuberant inventiveness with which he handles intertextual allusions. 'Mottoes' examines the most remarkable of Scott's intertextual devices, the chapter epigraphs, bringing into play the approaches developed in the previous chapters. The brief concluding 'Envoi' moves out again to the widest possible perspective, suggesting how readers should now be able to move on to, or return to, the novels and the critical conversation, with an appreciation of the central importance of the ludic for an appreciation of Scott in a world once again threatened by inhumane and humorless rigidities.

First published in 1987, this book is written for those who are encountering Wordsworth for the first time and for those familiar with his works that are at a loss to understand his reputation or why his work has impressed them. The strength of the author's approach is that it unravels the poet's true meaning and the process by which he all too frequently lost the voice of inspiration - working and reshaping his poems until the original freshness disappeared. It concentrates on helping the reader appreciate Wordsworth's distinctive and daring way with words and poetic structure. By showing Wordsworth's failures, the author demonstrates by contrast the achievements of his greatest works.

A complete, critically edited edition of the Waverley Novels as Scott originally wrote them The first of Scott's Waverley novels burst upon an astonished world in 1814. Its publication marked the emergence of the modern novel in the western world, influencing all the great 19th-century writers. This edition of Sir Walter Scott's novels captures the original power and freshness of his best-loved novels. Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production. This edition offers: a clean, corrected text; textual histories; explanatory notes; verbal changes from the first-edition text; and full glossaries. this novel focuses on the arrival of the first Crusaders in 1096. During the oath-taking ceremony on the eve of the Crusade, the haughty Count Robert insults the Emperor by seating himself on the imperial throne.

Anne of Geierstein (1829) is set in Central Europe in the fifteenth century, but it is a remarkably modern novel, for the central issues are the political instability and violence that arise from the mix of peoples and the fluidity of European boundaries. With Anne of Geierstein Scott concludes the unfinished historical business of Quentin Durward, working on a larger canvas with broader brush-strokes and generally with more sombre colours. The novel illustrates the darkening of Scott's historical vision in the final part of his career. It is also a remarkable manifestation of the way in which the scope of his imaginative vision continued to expand even as his physical powers declined. This new edition is based upon the first edition but is corrected by recovering from the manuscript about 2000 readings lost in some cases by misreadings of what Scott had written, but in many others from the assumption that those who processed Scott's text knew better than he did. This is the first modern critical edition of what was in its day a remarkably successful novel.

In his ever-popular romance of Tudor England, Scott brilliantly recreates all the passion, brutality, verve and vitality of the Elizabethan world. Only two of his novels end tragically - Kenilworth ends with the death of Amy Robsart, who unwisely loved Queen Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester.

The Siege of Malta is one of Scott's most moving works. The story of the Siege itself is remarkable, with its combination of individual defeat and group survival against overwhelming odds. It had been part of Scott's mental furniture from his early days, and it acquires a new and powerful resonance when remembered alongside his then-failing health. To read it is an enlarging experience, which anyone at all interested in Scott should share.
The incomplete narrative of Bizarro is also a fascinating document from the end of Scott's life. In it he returns to the figure of the bandit/outlaw which had intrigued him all his life and had played such an important part in two of his greatest novels, in the persons of Rob Roy himself in Rob Roy and Robin Hood in Ivanhoe.
* The only available editions of these two works by Scott
* Provides reading texts that remain broadly faithful to the manuscripts, but tidying them up in the way that the original intermediaries might have been expected to do
* Diplomatic transcriptions, which involves attempting to reproduce the manuscripts as faithfully as possible in type, using appropriate conventions to indicate deletions and doubtful readings
* Access to a digital reproduction of the manuscripts on an accompanying CD
* An Essay on the Text that outlines its genesis and composition, describing the manuscripts, and presenting and illustrating the procedures involved in preparing the reading text
* A Historical Note and set of Explanatory Notes along with a combined Glossary
* Accompanying CD containing digital photographs of the manuscripts.

Between 1829 and 1833 the first complete edition of Scott's fiction appeared, in 48 volumes issued one a month, each illustrated with two engravings, and with introductions and notes by Scott himself. The Magnum Opus, as it was familiarly called, was a project which aimed to reduce the enormous debt of over GBP126,000 which landed on Scott during the financial crisis of 1825-26, but it was much more than an exercise in book-making. Scott's introductions are semi-autobiographical essays in which he muses on his own art and the circumstances which gave rise to each of his works of fiction. His notes illustrate his text, sometimes with simple glosses, sometimes by quotations from historical sources, but most strikingly with further narratives which parallel rather than explain incidents and situations in the fiction.These volumes constitute the first systematic representation of Scott's contributions to his last great edition, the edition which defined the final shape of Scott's fiction for the nineteenth century. They conclude the publication of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, and as they include addenda and corrigenda covering the whole 28 volumes of Scott's fiction in the EEWN, they are an indispensable conclusion to the set. But above all they illustrate the parabolic imagination of the man who made the historical novel an intellectual force.

Woodstock opens in farce, yet it is one of Scott's darkest novels. It deals with revolution, to Scott the most disturbing of all subjects: 'it appears that every step we made towards liberty, has but brought us in view of more terrific perils'. Written during the financial crisis which led to his insolvency in January 1826, the novel, Scott feared, 'would not stand the test'. Yet it does: it is set in England in 1651 as Parliamentary forces hunt the fugitive Charles Stewart who days previously had been defeated at Worcester. In the superb portrait of Cromwell we see a self-torturing despot who attempts to be in full control in the name of religion; in the rakish Charles we see a man without self-reflection whose own libertarianism after his restoration to the English throne in 1660 permitted a great burgeoning in scientific enquiry and the arts. This edition of Woodstock is based on the first, but emended in the light of readings in the manuscript and proofs that were misread, and at times deliberately suppressed, as Scott's own hand-written words were turned into a printed book.

Castle Dangerous is the realisation of a thirty-year old project of Scott's to retell a story found in Barbour's Brus. Set in the early fourteenth century during the Scottish Wars of Independence, an English knight for a love wager commits himself to defend Douglas Castle against Scottish attempts to retake it. The ballad-like story embraces intriguing elements including national rivalry, and the idealisation and betrayal of love. The Douglas area, seen as an almost surrealist landscape of ravines, trenches, and tombs, and in abysmal weather, forms an appropriate setting for an impressively bleak narrative.

Quentin Durward is a young Scotsman seeking fame and fortune in the France of Louis XI in the fifteenth century. He knows little and understands less, but Scott represents his ignorance and naivete as useful to 'the most sagacious prince in Europe' who needs servants motivated solely by the desire for coin and credit and lacking any interest in France which would interfere with the execution of his political aims. In Quentin Durward Scott studies the first modern state in the process of destroying the European feudal system. By far the most important of Scott's sources for Quentin Durward is the splendid Memoirs of Philippe de Comines. Comines, who has more than a walk-on role in the novel itself, was trusted councillor of Charles the Bold of Burgundy until 1472, when Louis XI persuaded him to enter his service. Scott's contrasting portraits of Louis and Charles, crafty king and fiery duke, essentially derives from Comines, whose memoirs are generally regarded as the first example of modern analytical history rather than chronicle. But it is as story that Quentin Durward succeeds, and it is one of Scott's most absorbing tales.

The most haunting and Shakespearean of Scott's novels, The Bride of Lammermoor is a fast-paced tragedy set on the eve of the 1707 Union. The proud young Master of Ravenswood sees his estate pass to the astute Sir William Ashton. When Ravenswood falls in love with Ashton's daughter, her diabolical mother takes extreme measures to thwart the match - with tragic results. A story of immense gloomy power, infused by the unforgiving spirit of the North Sea. "The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously." Times Literary Supplement

Between 1829 and 1833 the first complete edition of Scott's fiction appeared, in 48 volumes issued one a month, each illustrated with two engravings, and with introductions and notes by Scott himself. The Magnum Opus, as it was familiarly called, was a project which aimed to reduce the enormous debt of over GBP126,000 which landed on Scott during the financial crisis of 1825-26, but it was much more than an exercise in book-making. Scott's introductions are semi-autobiographical essays in which he muses on his own art and the circumstances which gave rise to each of his works of fiction. His notes illustrate his text, sometimes with simple glosses, sometimes by quotations from historical sources, but most strikingly with further narratives which parallel rather than explain incidents and situations in the fiction.These volumes constitute the first systematic representation of Scott's contributions to his last great edition, the edition which defined the final shape of Scott's fiction for the nineteenth century. They conclude the publication of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, and as they include addenda and corrigenda covering the whole 28 volumes of Scott's fiction in the EEWN, they are an indispensable conclusion to the set. But above all they illustrate the parabolic imagination of the man who made the historical novel an intellectual force.

Set at the time of the Third Crusade (1189 - 92), The Betrothed is the first of Scott's Tales of the Crusaders. The betrothed is Eveline, daughter of a Norman noble, who is a victim of the Crusade in that her intended husband is required by the Church to fulfil his vow to join the war and departs for three years. The full horror of an arranged marriage, and of being a possible prize as men seek to gain possession of her is vividly realised--the heroine is never free; her fate is always determined by the agency of men. And being set on the Marches of Wales, it is not just men but differing cultures that strive for mastery over her. The Betrothed is a problem novel: as Scott was writing he himself was arranging the marriage of his elder son. It is a problem novel too in that it was deeply disliked by Scott's printer and publisher who forced significant changes. What Scott was required to do to meet their objections has been confronted for the first time in this, the first critical edition of the novel.

Against the background of Montrose's campaign of 1644-5, this spirited novel centres on one of Scott's most memorable creations - Sir Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket. This hard-headed Aberdonian contrasts tellingly with the weird and passionate Highland feud in which he becomes perilously entangled, as the narrative moves from Dalgetty's unflinching encounter with the Duke of Argyll, to his dramatic escape from Inveraray Castle, to the battle of Inverlochy. "The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously." Times Literary Supplement

The second of "Tales of the Crusaders," "The Talisman" is set in Palestine during the Third Crusade (1189 - 92). Scott constructs a story of chivalric action, apparently adopting a medieval romance view of the similarities in the values of both sides. But disguise is the leading theme of the tale: it is not just that characters frequently wear clothing that conceals their identity, but that professions and cultures hide their true nature.

In this novel the Christian leaders are divided by a factious criminality, and are contrasted to the magnanimity and decisiveness of Saladin, the leader of the Moslem armies. In a period when the west was fascinated with the exotic east, Scott represents the Moslem other as more humane than the Christian west.

"The Talisman" is one of Scott's great novels. It is a superb tale. It is also a bold departure as, for the first time, Scott explores not cultural conflict within a country or society but in the opposition of two world religions.