Abstract
HISTORICAL FICTION: A POSTCOLONIAL VIEW OF SIR WALTER SCOTT’S WAVERLEY
Starting in Europe as a Western literary genre, the historical fiction emerged as meta-fiction and magic realism against the progressive dilemmas and anxieties of modern life. Writers of historical fiction managed to find a relationship between an event and history, which is recently referred to as ‘historical narration’. The narration is utilized as exchangeable with history for the sake of understanding the actual fact in the past. The first who employed this type is Sir Walter Scott who is credited with establishing historical fiction and is famous for his Waverley Novels (1814) which was set during the era of the Jacobite uprising and brought him to the tip of his contemporaries. The current study will utilize the textual analysis of the selected novel from the postcolonial point of perspective. In fact, the postcolonial theory portrays history in both place and time focusing on religion, cultural economics, and societies in that postcolonial literature traces and interprets the premises of the past and their repercussions. With reference to the character of Waverley, Scott’s most favorite persona, the paper will therefore investigate and examine his way of living in colonies, coping with others, and how the he as colonized can overcome existential political and cultural crises. The aim of the paper is to show what exactly happened in the past and what impacts are seen in the present. The investigation will focus on traditional and Scottish tribes, Jacobite and Hanoverians, the colonizers and colonized people, and their interconnected yet paradoxical relationships.
Keywords
Postcolonial, Walter Scott, Waverley, meta-fiction, Jacobite, Hanoverians
