Week 5 – 'Writing the Border: Walter Scott and the Travel Narrative'

Céline Sabiron, University of Oxford

This week our speaker will be Dr Céline Sabiron, who is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. She'll be presenting research from her forthcoming book (to be published by Provence University Press) focusing on Walter Scott's border narratives. These historico-geographical novels are structured around Scotland's vertebral column – ending in the south with the national border and composed in the north of the internal border marked by the Highland Boundary Fault, a sensitive area separating Lowlands and Highlands – serving as a narrative pivot around which the plots hinge. This monograph seeks to question the sense, understood as both meaning and direction, of cross-border travel in Scott's Scottish novels. Three types of travel – physical, symbolic, and eventually literary – will be analysed in turn to provide a complete reassessment of the relationship between Scott's novels and the travel literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the influence of Scott's work on the English and French literature from the second half of the 19th century.

All welcome!