Editing Walter Scott (section)

===Later assessment===
Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and abroad,<ref>"...it would be difficult to name, from among both modern and ancient works, many read more widely and with greater pleasure than the historical novels of ... Walter Scott." – [[Alessandro Manzoni]], ''On the Historical Novel''.</ref> Scott's critical reputation declined in the last half of the 19th century as serious writers turned from romanticism to realism, and Scott began to be regarded as an author suitable for children. This trend accelerated in the 20th century. For example, in his classic study ''[[Aspects of the Novel]]'' (1927), [[E. M. Forster]] harshly criticized Scott's clumsy and slapdash writing style, "flat" characters, and thin plots. In contrast, the novels of Scott's contemporary [[Jane Austen]], once appreciated only by a discerning few (including, as it happened, Scott himself) rose steadily in critical esteem, though Austen, as a female writer, was still faulted for her narrow ("feminine") choice of subject matter, which, unlike Scott, avoided the grand historical themes traditionally viewed as masculine.

Nevertheless, Scott's importance as an innovator continued to be recognised. He was acclaimed as the inventor of the genre of the modern historical novel (which others{{who?|date=July 2024}} trace to [[Jane Porter]], whose work in the genre predates Scott's{{cn|date=July 2024}}<ref>McLean, T. (2099). Jane Porter’s later works, 1825-1846. ''Harvard Library Bulletin'', ''20''(2), 45–63.</ref>) and the inspiration for enormous numbers of imitators and genre writers both in Britain and on the European continent. In the cultural sphere, Scott's Waverley novels played a significant part in the movement (begun with [[James Macpherson]]'s ''[[Ossian]]'' cycle) in rehabilitating the public perception of the [[Scottish Highlands]] and its culture, which had been formerly been viewed by the southern mind as a barbaric breeding ground of hill bandits, religious fanaticism, and [[Jacobitism|Jacobite risings]].

Scott served as chairman of the [[Royal Society of Edinburgh]] and was also a member of the [[Royal Celtic Society]]. His own contribution to the reinvention of Scottish culture was enormous, even though his re-creations of the customs of the [[Scottish Highlands|Highlands]] were fanciful at times. Through the medium of Scott's novels, the violent religious and political conflicts of the country's recent past could be seen as belonging to history—which Scott defined, as the subtitle of ''Waverley'' ("'Tis Sixty Years Since") indicates, as something that happened at least 60 years earlier. His advocacy of objectivity and moderation and his strong repudiation of political violence on either side also had a strong, though unspoken, contemporary resonance in an era when many conservative English speakers lived in mortal fear of a revolution in the French style on British soil. Scott's orchestration of [[Visit of King George IV to Scotland|King George IV's visit to Scotland]], in 1822, was a pivotal event intended to inspire a view of his home country that accentuated the positive aspects of the past while allowing the age of quasi-medieval blood-letting to be put to rest, while envisioning a more useful, peaceful future.

After Scott's work had been essentially unstudied for many decades, a revival of critical interest began in the middle of the 20th century. While [[F. R. Leavis]] had disdained Scott, seeing him as a thoroughly bad novelist and a thoroughly bad influence (''[[The Great Tradition]]'' [1948]), [[György Lukács]] (''The Historical Novel'' [1937, trans. 1962]) and [[David Daiches]] (''Scott's Achievement as a Novelist'' [1951]) offered a Marxian political reading of Scott's fiction that generated a great deal of interest in his work. These were followed in 1966 by a major thematic analysis covering most of the novels by Francis R. Hart (''Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival''). Scott has proved particularly responsive to [[Postmodern]] approaches, most notably to the concept of the interplay of multiple voices highlighted by [[Mikhail Bakhtin]], as suggested by the title of the volume with selected papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference held in Edinburgh in 1991, ''Scott in Carnival''. Scott is now increasingly recognised not only as the principal inventor of the historical novel and a key figure in the development of Scottish and world literature, but also as a writer of a depth and subtlety who challenges his readers as well as entertaining them.