CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Article Title

Anti-Nationalism in Scott's Old Mortality

Authors

Montserrat Martínez García, Complutense University Madrid

Abstract

In her article "Anti-Nationalism in Scott's Old Mortality," Montserrat Martínez García examines national identity through war in Walter Scott's Old Mortality in order to illustrate that war was one of the main catalysts of nationhood and show, simultaneously, the disparity between the institutional and the popular attitude toward war. Martínez García pays attention to the way Scott portrayed war and identity and to what extent this literary representation coincided with or faced the uniform ideology of nationalism. Based on the historical background of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Martínez García analyses Scott's novel to uncover focus his narrative of cracks and fissures to throw light on the parameters of war and identity construction and on the demystification of Scott as a blinkered nationalist. The results of her analysis suggest that Scott's narrative of war and its accompanying ideologies reveal that in the novel historical, political, and religious identities do not constitute the text as a description of a homogeneous nation and that Scott's text can stand as a narrative against nineteenth-century nationalism in England.

Recommended Citation

Martínez García, Montserrat. "Anti-Nationalism in Scott's Old Mortality." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.1 (2010): <http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1576>

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