Tag: Walter Scott

The rise and fall of the historical novel?

Digitizing the Victorians

Everyone agrees that the historical novel is an almost impossible genre to write successfully. Yet it keeps being written, and being successful. It’s having rather a boom in the early 21st century, with the success of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy and others.  And it had its biggest boom in the early Victorian period, propelled into the limelight by Walter Scott and his Waverley novels, and proliferated by many anonymous and many now sidelined authors including John Galt, sisters Jane

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Sophie Cooper, ‘Outlander’ and the Victorian resurgence of Highland romanticism

Published in JVC, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Sophie Cooper is a second year PhD student and William McFarlane Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago between 1850 and 1890, specifically in relation to situational influences on identity formation and nationalist thought. Sophie tweets using the handle @SophcoCooper and more information can be found on her academia page. The growing popularity of Amazon Prime’s recent Starz acquisition ‘Outlander’, an adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s 1991 book, will undoubtedly lead to a surge

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Patrick Allan-Fraser: Victorian Artist, Architect, Author, Collector & Philanthropist

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Duncan McLaren I’ve just been the inaugural writer-in-residence at Hospitalfield near Arbroath. The place is a great resource in respect of Victorian art and literature, as Patrick-Allan Fraser – who left the house to artists of the future when he died in 1890 – had personal links with Dickens as well as Augustus Egg, William Powell Frith and many other artists. I’ve put together a website www.patisback.co.uk which is ongoing. Here is a page-by- page guide to what’s there

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