Romance·Reality·History

Sir Walter Scott was the originator of the historical novel genre. Based on close reading of the masterpieces of Scott's historical novels, the thesis takes the historical novels of Walter Scott as the milestone in the history of novels and discusses the different features and amalgamation of Romanticism and Realism in these novels.Chapter one analyzes the Romantic style of Scott's historical novels. A number of Gothic factors such as ghosts, presages and the terrible scenes that appeared in the historical novels of Walter Scott could be taken as the recognition of Gothic literature. The Romantic features of Scott's historical novels focused on singing the praises of all the good characters of human beings in generality, and creating a better world in his novels. Chapter two studies the Realistic features in Scott's historical novels and the achievements, which are mainly embodied in three aspects. Firstly, he reflected the great changes in the history and old times through personal experiences. Secondly, he shaped the most amazing personification of the labor classes of people; sang high praise of the good and noble characters of the Scottish people on their love of freedom and homeland. The last but not least, Scott's historical novels brought to life the manners and mores of lost Scotland especially the Highland civilization by using the plain language with humor of people's own. Chapter three examines the historical novels of Scott with the theory of modern Literary Anthropology for their characteristic as Poetics of Ethnography. Meanwhile, this Chapter also explores Scott's idea of historical novels as chasing "the truth of poem", and the consistency between the way Scott dealt with the relationship of literature and history and New historicism.