Catherine Jone's Literary Memory explores the relationship of memory to
writing in the long eighteenth century in Scotland and America. It does
so by arguing for Walter Scott's adaptation and development in the
Waverley Novels of varieties of literary memory from the philosophy and
psychological theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the eighteenth
century, philosophy (defined broadly as thinking about knowledge,
existence, and being) became inseparable from psychology (the science of
the mind). Locating Scott within this rich intellectual context, Jones
explores his understanding of, and narrative transformation of, various
forms of literary memory, while judiciously distinguishing Scott's
complex and influential achievement from later Freudian theories and
representations. Casting the cultural and historical perspective wider
still, this book also offers a lucid and original account of the
ideological rejection of the cultural synthesis represented by Scott's
literary memory by the New England romance writers, Washington Irving,
James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Theoretically and
historically grounded, Literary Memory will appeal to all those
interested in the writings of Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment,
Romantic cultural history, the history of the novel, narrative theory,
and literature in relation to psychology and psychoanalysis.
