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Literary Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780748605767
- Weight: 743g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 10 Apr 2001
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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No historical figures appear in The Pirate, and there are no historical events, but it is still an historical novel because it dramatises those ‘corners of time’ where an old era is coming to an end, and a new is beginning. The novel is set in Orkney and Shetland in 1689, and for the northern isles the ‘Glorious Revolution’ actually means the beginning of the cultural dominance of Scotland and the advent of English power.Scott draws heavily on the diary he kept on his tour round the lighthouses of Scotland in 1814. In both the diary and the novel he weighs the real need to improve the agricultural methods of this barely subsistence economy against the force of tradition and the human cost of rapid change.The plot hinges on an illicit relationship, and is driven by dark men twisted by their criminality, an obsessed woman searching for her lost son, and the murderous rivalry of two young men - a family tale which illustrates the uses and abuses of traditional lore, as well as Scott’s extraordinary grasp of the literature of the north.
Sir Walter Scott, was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet. Many of his works remain classics and include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Mark Weinstein is Professor of English Literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Alison Lumsden is a senior lecturer in the School of Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen and co-director of the Walter Scott Research Centre. She was for many years research fellow and then General Editor for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels and has published on several Scottish authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Nan Shepherd and Louis Grassic Gibbon. She is about to begin work on a scholarly edition of Scott's poetry.
