Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- 1 The American historical romance: a prospectus
- 2 The Waverley-model and the rise of historical romance
- 3 Historical romance and the stadialist model of progress
- 4 The regionalism of historical romance
- 5 Hawthorne and the ironies of New England history
- 6 Melville: the red comets return
- 7 The hero and heroine of historical romance
- 8 The historical romance of the South
- 9 Retrospect: departures and returns
- Notes
- Index
7 - The hero and heroine of historical romance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- 1 The American historical romance: a prospectus
- 2 The Waverley-model and the rise of historical romance
- 3 Historical romance and the stadialist model of progress
- 4 The regionalism of historical romance
- 5 Hawthorne and the ironies of New England history
- 6 Melville: the red comets return
- 7 The hero and heroine of historical romance
- 8 The historical romance of the South
- 9 Retrospect: departures and returns
- Notes
- Index
Summary
At the time that Scott decided to abandon the field of extended verse narrative to Byron and Southey, the field of prose fiction was dominated by women authors: most notably by Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and, soon thereafter, Jane Austen. One reason why he hesitated to become, and to become known as, a novelist may have been that during the half century preceding the publication of Waverley fiction-writing had been increasingly identified as a female preserve. (A measure of the degree to which novel-writing was feminized during this period is that in 1819 Cooper's first response to his wife's challenge to write “a better novel” was not to imitate Scott but to don a seemingly female persona and produce, in Precaution, a novel more reminiscent of Jane Austen's than of any male author's work.) Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century male writers, or at least the most talented ones, generally devoted themselves to other kinds of literature, and during this period there was a glorious flowering of historiography and heroic poetry – narrative genres which were more ancient and “serious” than either the novel or prose romance, and which were also traditionally masculine in authorship and even in readership. By assimilating these genres within the novel, Scott created a branch of modern prose fiction which combined the courtship matter of novel and romance with the historical and heroic matter of epic which spoke more directly and exclusively to the experience and aspirations of men.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The American Historical Romance , pp. 220 - 271Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987