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This critical biography the indifference which has surrounded Scott in this century and the distortions of his Victorian idolators to recapture the freshness of Scott as he appeared to his contemporaries. By weaving together the life and works, and examining all of Scott's best-known books
Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history. Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.
This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers’ houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author’s private and artistic persona; it also demonstrates how this materialized process of self-fashioning is subsequently appropriated within various strategies and policies of cultural memory.
'I have read all W. Scott's novels at least fifty times,' wrote Byron. '.. .grand work. Scotch Fielding, as well as great English poet -wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.'A.N. Wilson's subtle, entertaining and frequently provocative critical biography looks back through the indifference which has surrounded Walter Scott in recent times, and the distortions of his Victorian idolaters, to recapture the freshness of Scott as he appeared to his contemporaries.Despite his staggering output as a novelist, poet, biographer, historian and anthologist -not to mention his copious letters, and the celebrated Journal - Scott only embarked on his literary career in early middle age. In the face of constant ill-health, and financial and domestic troubles, he successfully combined the life of a bestselling, much-loved and enormously influential author with that of a lawyer, landowner, Border farmer, part-time soldier and paterfamilias. A.N. Wilson makes clear that Scott's genius, his humaneness, and his splendid qualities of stoicism and sympathy were as apparent in his life as in his work. Few writers can have been so likeable and so unpretentious, and it is hardly surprising that Scott has always been a popular subject with biographers. Yet most modern critics have tried to divorce the life from the work, or to minimise his reputation by suggesting that his talents were recognised in only a few of his works. By weaving together the life and the works, and discussing all Scott's best-known books as well as many which are less familiar, A.N. Wilson has produced a lively and contagiously enthusiastic reassessment of the writer who was, he believes, 'the greatest single imaginative genius of the nineteenth century'. Walter Scott's influence was felt not only in the field of literature, but also in the worlds of art, architecture, opera and domestic manners, and by figures as diverse as Byron and Queen Victoria, Dickens and Donizetti, Pugin and Victor Hugo.