Walter Scott瓦尔特·司各特简介
1771-1832 诗：The Minstrlsy of the Scottish Border苏格兰边区歌谣集;Marimion玛里恩;The Lady of the Lake湖上夫人小说：Waverley威弗利;Guy Mannering盖·曼纳令;Rob Roy罗布罗伊;The Heart of Midlothian米德洛西恩监狱;Ivanhoe艾凡赫;Kenilworth坎尼尔华斯;Woodstock皇家猎馆;Queentin Durward昆廷·达沃
born August 15, 1771, Edinburgh
died September 21, 1832, Abbotsford, Roxburgh, Scotland
∙Sir Walter Scott, detail of an oil painting by Sir Edwin Henry Lander, 1824; in the National …
Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and biographer who is often considered both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel.
Scott's father was a lawyer and his mother was the daughter of a physician. From his earliest years, Scott was fond of listening to his elderly relatives' accounts and stories of the Scottish Border, and he soon became a voracious reader of poetry, history, drama, and fairy tales and romances. He had a remarkably retentive memory and astonished visitors by his eager reciting of poetry. His explorations of the neighbouring countryside developed in him both a love of natural beauty and a deep appreciation of the historic struggles of his Scottish forebears.
Scott was educated at the high school at Edinburgh and also for a time at the grammar school at Kelso. In 1786 he was apprenticed to his father as writer to the signet, a Scots equivalent of the English solicitor (attorney). His study and practice of law were somewha七夕伤感文章
单反相机排行榜t desultory, for his immen youthful energy was diverted into social activities and into miscellaneous readings in Italian, Spanish, French, German, and Latin. After a very deeply felt early disappointment in love, he married, in December 1797, Charlotte Carpenter, of a French royalist family, with whom he lived happily until her death in 1826.
In the mid-1790s Scott became interested in German Romanticism, Gothic novels, and Scottish border ballads. His first published work, The Cha, and William and Helen (1796), was a translation of two ballads by the German Romantic balladeer G.A. Bürger. A poor translation of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen followed in 1799. Scott's interest in border ballads finally bore fruit in his collection of them entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vol. (1802–03). His attempts to “restore” the orally corrupted versions back to their original compositions sometimes resulted in powerful poems that show a sophisticated Romantic flavour. The work made Scott's name known to a wide public, and he followed up his first success with a full-length narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), which ran into many editions. The poem's clear and vigorous storytelling, Scottish regionalist elements, honest pathos, and vivid evocations of landscape were rep
江西是江南吗eated in further poetic romances, including Marmion (1808), 诙谐曲The Lady of the Lake (1810), which was the most successful of the pieces, Rokeby阿明总统 (1813), and The Lord of the Isles (1815).
Scott led a highly active literary and social life during the years. In 1808 his 18-volume edition of the works of John Dryden appeared, followed by his 19-volume edition of Jonathan Swift (1814) and other works. But his finances now took the first of veral disastrous turns that were to partly determine the cour of his future career. His appointment as sheriff depute of the county of Selkirk in 1799 (a position he was to keep all his life) was a welcome supplement to his income, as was his appointment in 1806 as clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh. But he had also become a partner in a printing (and later publishing) firm owned by James Ballantyne and his irresponsible brother John. By 1813 this firm was hovering on the brink of financial disaster, and although Scott saved the company from bankruptcy, from that time onward everything he wrote was done partly in order to make money and pay off the lasting debts he had incurred. Another ruinous expenditure was the country hou he was having built at Abbotsford, w
hich he stocked with enormous quantities of antiquarian objects.
By 1813 Scott had begun to tire of narrative poetry, and the greater depth and verve of Lord Byron's narrative poems threatened to oust him from his position as supreme purveyor of this kind of literary entertainment. In 1813 Scott rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had started in 1805, and in the early summer of 1814 he wrote with extraordinary speed almost the whole of his novel, which he titled Waverley. It was one of the rare and happy cas in literary history when something original and powerful was immediately recognized and enjoyed by a large public. A story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, it reinterpreted and prented with living force the manners and loyalties of a vanished Scottish Highland society. The book was published anonymously, as were all of the many novels he wrote down to 1827.
五彩斑斓的意思
In Waverley and succeeding novels Scott's particular literary gifts could be utilized to their fullest extent. First and foremost, he was a born storyteller who could place a large cast of vivid and varied characters in an exciting and turbulent historical tting. He was also a
master of dialogue who felt equally at home with expressive Scottish regional speech and the polished courtesies of knights and aristocrats. His deep knowledge of Scottish history and society and his acute obrvation of its mores and attitudes enabled him to play the part of a social historian in insightful depictions of the whole range of Scottish society, from beggars and rustics to the middle class and the professions and on up to the landowning nobility. The attention Scott gave to ordinary people was indeed a marked departure from previous historical novels' concentration on royalty. His flair for picturesque incidents enabled him to describe with equal vigour both eccentric Highland personalities and the fierce political and religious conflicts that agitated Scotland during the 17th and 18th centuries. Finally, Scott was the master of a rich, ornate, emingly effortless literary style that blended energy with decorum, lyric beauty with clarity of description.
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