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Set within a framing narrative, these three stories take place in the years following the Jacobite defeat and feature characters who are leaving Scotland to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In two of Walter Scott's best-known tales, "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers," two young men are torn between traditional Scottish loyalties and the opportunities offered by England. "The Surgeon's Daughter" follows three young Scots to India during the first years of the British Empire. All three highlight Scott's unique gift for re-creating the spirit of historical eras and painting stirring portraits of Scottish people.
The Fortunes of Nigel is a historical novel set in the early 17th century. It follows the adventures of Nigel Olifaunt, a Scottish nobleman, as he tries to make his fortune in the court of King James I. Filled with political intrigue, romance, and swashbuckling action, this novel is a classic example of the historical fiction genre. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
The island of Malta is key to the control of the central Mediterranean Sea. For five months in 1561 a Turkish force attacked Malta--and was defied, in a great epic of endurance, by the Knights of St. John. Sir Walter Scott visited the island a year before his death, and gathered material to write a novel about it, dying before it was complete. Now S. Fowler Wright has finished Scott's last great historical romance. This is a story of high courage and deep faith. At its centre stands the old Grand Master of the Order, La Vallette (after whom Valetta was named), grim and unshakeable. But it is also a story of love undaunted amid fearful perils; of a girl who, rather than be separated from the man she loves, learns to wield a sword, and, escaping by a hairsbreadth from the clutches of the infidel, finally wins even the Grand Master's grudging admiration. Here is a novel to stir the blood and stimulate the imagination.
For the last fifty years or so the standard critical view of Sir Walter Scott's fiction has been that, while paying full tribute to Scotland's heroic, ancient independence and romantic Jacobite past, his Scottish Waverley Novels ultimately present Scotland's future as nonetheless belonging within the peace, prosperity and progress of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Julian Meldon D'Arcy's Subversive Scott radically revises this conventional evaluation of Scott's work and reveals that embedded in the Waverley Novels narratives are dissonant discourses and discreet subtexts which inspire far more subversive readings than hitherto perceived. Indeed, D'Arcy argues, there is considerable evidence in Scott's work to corroborate a claim that, despite his apparently politically correct fiction and lifestyle, his Waverley Novels contain undetected and underrated manifestations of Scottish nationalism which not only invoke sharp criticism of both the Union and English imperial policy, but also reveal his passionate concern, as a true Scotsman, with the issues of Scotland's national identity, dignity, and independence. Given the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, and Scotland's resurgent sense of political identity and relevance, D'Arcy's re-evaluation of the Waverley Novels is thus a fresh, timely and stimulating contribution to the study of Sir Walter Scott's fiction and politics.
