History After Waterloo: Margaret Oliphant Reads Walter Scott

In Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen, the novels of Walter Scott teach individuals how to respond emotionally to the Napoleonic Wars. But such romance narratives are unable to represent Britain’s colonial activities with the same specificity as the European theater of war. As the novel moves beyond Waterloo, Oliphant corrects for this by privileging the prehistory of narrative over its conclusions. This temporal reorientation allows her to point to colonial events that are occluded when British history is conceived as a triumphal romance, and to evoke the process by which narratives--instead of moving toward designated ends--ceaselessly reshape themselves beyond all expectations.