Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist by Jane Millgate (review)

HUMANITIES 417 Michael J. Petry on 'Editing Hegel's Encyclopaedia' describes two current projects, the GesammeIte Werke from various editors under the title Hegel-Archiv, and what he calls the English edition, which, after some searching of his bibliography, I identify as Petry's own ongoing series of German texts and English translations. Both editions face the difficulty of presenting adequately what might be called variously a text in a state of flux, in that Hegel revised successive editions of the Encyclopaedia, or a non-text, in that the printed work in its various forms served primarily as a basis for oral versions which are preserved in unusually accurate notes or transcripts of Hegel's lectures, taken down by his students. The GesammeIte Werke will meet the difficulty by providing accurate texts of works descending directly from Hegel, with an apparatus recording the flux mentioned above, and a selection of students' reports where these add significantly to published matter. The problems ofthe English edition are less amenable to a general solution, and involve nice editorial decisions based on the textual material available for particular texts or groups of texts; they are too numerous and complex to be detailed here. Petry also discusses the requirements of a Commentary designed for the general reader of philosophy, and the difficulties and pitfalls of translating Hegel into English. This volume, like its predecessors, is rich in the problems which fascinate those who make editing their craft, and fertile in solutions arising from individual expertise and profitable collaboration. (W.J.B. OWEN) Jane Millgate. Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist University of Toronto Press. 223· $24.95 Professor Jane Millgate's subtle, elegantly written book on the early Waverley Novels is a valuable addition not only to the study of Scott but to the study of narrative. This is not to suggest that Millgate in some sense uses Scott as a pretextfor theoretical speculation. On the contrary, Scottis clearly her central text, and it is precisely through specific attention to specific works that she opens up theoretical implications about the writing and reading of novels. Without making large or strident claims, this book confirms the significance of Scott for those interested in the narrative imagination. Millgate's study is shaped by the appropriately nineteenth-century metaphor of process indicated in her subtitle: The Making of the Novelist. After two excellent chapters on the pre-novelistic Scott, Millgate considers in chronological order each of the nine novels (Waverley to A Legend of Montrose) included in the 1819 edition of Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley, the first collection of Scott novels. This collection marks Scott's conscious recognition of the completion of one phase of his novelistic 418 LETTERS IN CANADA 1984 career, and it allows Millgate to examine the development ofthe notion of Waverley Novel. One ofthe major contributions ofher study, in fact, is to draw attention to the implications of the usually taken-for-granted convention whereby Scott's novels are - and were - known by their collective title of The Waverley Novels. The conventional phrase 'By the Author of Waverley/ Millgate argues, soon acquired 'extraordinary nominative power,' so that WaverleyNovelcame to function as a category shaping 'both the genesis and reception of the novels as first published' (Preface). As a category, Waverley Novel emerges as less static than dynamic, its paradigmatic text, Waverley, subject to continual interpretation and modification; hence Millgate's insistence on studying the novels in sequence. The historical focus suggested by terms like I genesis' and 'reception' and by Millgate's early insistence on Scott's career as 'an historical phenomenon' is of a special kind, depending as it does on a formalist sense ofhistory as the history of texts in their relationship to one another. Millgate's observation that Scott uses 'the Waverley context' to establish 'a dialogue ... with himself and his first readers about the conventions of the new fictional subgenre he was in the process of creating' (Preface) leads to her exploration of 'the Waverley game' played by the literary, textual constructs of Author of Waverley and 'initiated reader.' Millgate denies neither external reference nor cultural content, but her primary concern is with the internal...