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Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers
Ian Dennis
Violent Victimhood
and Carnal Reason in Scotts The
Tale of Old Mortality
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ABSTRACT
A pivotal decade in late seventeenth-century Scottish history is covered in one of first historical novels by Sir Walter Scott, the genres acknowledged originator. This is a period of religious and political conflict, in which doubled enemies attempt to achieve monopoly through state and insurgent violenceand indeed trade places at the centre and margins only to give way to an insecure, ultimately foreign imposition of constitutional compromise and toleration, brought on by the arrival of the Anglo-Dutch monarchy of William and Mary on the English throne.
In Old Mortality (1816), perhaps the greatest of his works, a vulnerable, weak and in some sense insubstantial identity of moderationfictionally exemplified by the reluctant Presbyterian insurgent Henry Morton--confronts two violent, solid and possibly more permanent ones, vividly embodied in a small gallery of some of Scotts most memorable portraits of real historical figures.
My mimetic reading of this prescient novel will examine the authors meditation on the persistence and power not just of strong identity, but also of the spectacular victimhoods generated by the historical processes of putative modernization.
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Ian Dennis is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (St. Martins Press and Macmillan, 1997) and has published article-length mimetic readings of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and other Romantic novelists. His more recent work on the Mimetic Theory and Lord Byron, which makes substantial use of the writings of both René Girard and Eric Gans, has been published in Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review and the Keats-Shelley Journal, and his book Lord Byron and the History of Desire, is in submission. He is also a novelist with four published titles, the most recent of which is The Emperors Assassin (Random House, 2003), co-authored under the pseudonym T. F. Banks. Ian Dennis has presented papers at the 2004, 2005 and 2006 COV&R conferences.