SOURCE: Hennelly, Mark M. “Waverley and Romanticism.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 28, no. 2 (September 1973): 194-209.

In the following essay, Hennelly analyzes Waverley as a romantic novel characterized by Scott's extensive use of myth, dialectic, and romance elements in the narrative.

Since Morse Peckham's now classic article, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,”¹ published in 1951, Romanticism has been picked to the bone by critical dissection and each of its parts labeled and catalogued. It is now time, I think, to reassemble and enflesh the skeleton by the close scrutiny of a single work that embodies those three elements of Romantic vision and methodology which have most prompted recent scholarly investigation, that is, the Romance, myth, and dialectic. Although there is obvious critical overlapping here since any perceptive student of the movement must adopt a somewhat holistic approach, still the respective work of Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, and Albert Gérard most representatively...