Exclusive Interiorities: Forgotten Novels and the Walter Scott Importance Trope

Abstract:This paper studies how and why Walter Scott's Waverley Novels remain outside of the canon despite a burgeoning Scott studies subfield on the rise in the literary studies community. The article identifies the disconnect between Scott scholarship and Scott pedagogy as a way into a larger set of problems involving how late nineteenth-century and modernist aesthetics set enduring standards for "good writing." If we take Scott's de-canonization as a test case, we gain insight into how literary interiority—itself a carefully disguised construct—obfuscates and displaces older standards of writerly quality and learn how to find new, twenty-first-century applications for now forgotten novels.