The politics of nostalgia and the signification of space: Walter Scott and Washington Irving

This dissertation considers Washington Irving and Walter Scott as self-conscious theorists of the relationship between temporality and space. Charting their mutual influence and parallel career trajectories, I explain that Scott and Irving jointly catalyze a change in historical thinking by experimenting with the construction and circulation of history in their fictional, quasi-fictional, and architectural productions. While both writers are usually read as offering the indulgence of nostalgia as a compensation for endorsing mercantile modernity, I argue that Scott and Irving explore the politics of nostalgia in order to foreground modern ironies of historical time and space.;This study begins by examining Scott's and Irving's liminal position between Enlightenment and Romantic historicism, discussing how they engage prevailing theories of history in Waverley and Knickerbocker's History of New York. I argue that by exploring the problems and potential of different historiographic modes, and by challenging dominant interpretations of important events, both writers open up new possibilities for historical understanding and representation. This historicist potential is developed through Scott's and Irving's use of various historian and antiquarian personae, especially in Old Mortality and The Sketch Book, to stage conflicts between the social fictions of endorsing progress and recovering (or inventing) ancestral traditions. In the complex interactions among these personae, models for the collective understanding of the past are generated. These forms of collective understanding, as the final section of the dissertation emphasizes, are dependent on the production of historical space. Focusing on the realization of Scott's and Irving's complex historical visions in their homes at Abbotsford and Sunnyside, I conclude by evaluating how stories about the past develop from and return to physical space. Through an exploration of Scott's and Irving's modes of literary tourism and self-conscious creation of historical sites, I explain how modern historical understanding is generated through a complex kind of nostalgia for particularly meaningful places. Considering Scott and Irving in a context of contemporaneous historiography, tourist guidebooks, and political polemics, I argue that their loosely collaborative transatlantic work collectively changes thinking about the past by reorienting relationships between individual understanding and geographical space.