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The Form of Media History: Narrator-Space and The Lay of the Last Minstrel
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 3, Summer 2014
- pp. 697-716
- 10.1353/sel.2014.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
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In this essay, I argue that Walter Scott’s scholarly interest in what he calls the “melting and dissolving” of Scotland’s “peculiar features”—the traditions, superstitions, and so on—into those of England, finds a formal analog in his best-selling narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. I focus on how Scott enriches narrator-space—a narratological category that structures the relations and tensions among multiple narrating voices in a single work—to examine the changes that make up media history. While Romantic-era media theory tends to be criticized for the way it produces a “confrontational model[] of print and oral tradition,” I argue that Scott uses narrative form in his poetry to produce a much more complex account of media-historical change than we might otherwise expect.