Plenary Speakers

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About the speaker

Deidre Shauna Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, has published widely on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century British literature, the theory of the novel, the history of reading, and the history of the book. She is the author of the prize-winning The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998) and Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015).

Other publications include editions of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Persuasion and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the Romantic-period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2018), and the edited collections Cultural Institutions of the Novel (co-edited with William B. Warner), 1996, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000), and, most recently The Unfinished Book (co-edited with Alexandra Gillespie, 2021).

About the lecture

The title of Prof. Lynch’s lecture is ‘Unbinding Walter Scott: Books, Scraps and Dispersive Reading.’

To help us see Scott anew after 250 years, this lecture takes its cue from a robust trans-Atlantic tradition of commonplacing and scrapbooking and explores nineteenth-century readers’ ways of cutting up, decontextualising, re-collecting, re-contextualising and rebooting Scott’s printed works inside those home-made manuscript volumes.

To survey how readers figuratively and sometimes literally unbound their Waverley Novels is to learn something new, I propose, about Scott’s own, often-conflicting accounts of the individuated author, of the bounded text, and in particular of the codex form’s relationship to both. Literary criticism and book history alike have, of course, underscored the significance of Scott’s creation of the Magnum Opus edition--a repossession, on behalf of a newly individuated author, and between the covers of a uniformly manufactured edition, of publications that had previously appeared as the works of sundry authorial eidolons.

For a nineteenth-century culture of collected editions, this act of rebinding represents a foundational moment. On the other hand, Scott’s own novels--particularly Waverley, Rob Roy, The Monastery (my points of reference in this lecture)--themselves yield an alternative account of the book, one that in some way might have encouraged their readers to pull the novels (back) into pieces.

In this account, the book is something scrappy, loosely bound, and made through scissors and paste methods: a temporary gathering ready to be dispersed once more (recall how, in Scott’s repetition of a joke about books’ contents and books as containers that goes back to Tristram Shandy, Frank Osbaldistone’s books in Rob Roy seem more than once to have lost their leaves). The dispersive readings that are part of Scott’s nineteenth-century afterlife might also, I’ll suggest in my conclusion, prove useful points of reference for the twenty-first century English classroom: resources we may draw on to conceptualize a more inclusive pedagogy.

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We are delighted to welcome Prof. Alison Lumsden to give the Jane Millgate Memorial Lecture, in memory of the great British-Canadian Scott scholar Jane Millgate (1937–2019), kindly sponsored by the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.

Alison Lumsden is Regius Chair of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, where she also directs the Walter Scott Research Centre. She was a general editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels and is now the lead editor of the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry. She acts as Honorary Librarian for the Faculty of Advocates Abbotsford Collection Trust and is a Trustee for the Abbotsford Trust. As well as editing and co-editing many of the volumes in EEWN, she is the author of Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (2010). In addition to her work on Scott she has published on Robert Louis Stevenson, Alasdair Gray, Nan Shepherd, Robert Burns and Lewis Grassic Gibbon and is co-editor of Contemporary Scottish Women Writers (2000).