Historical Fiction as a Mixture of History and Romance: Towards the Genre Definition of the Historical Novel

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on Walter Scott’s Waverley and its classification as the founding text of the historical novel by Georg Lukacs. The author attempts to show that Lukacs takes Scott too much at his word and posits Waverley in the tradition of the English historical novel as it developed from Defoe and Fielding, while neglecting the close ties that Waverley has with marginalized genres such as romance. The author also argues that rather than being an expression of class consciousness, Waverley is an attempt to justify a certain change in political attitude, from radicalism to conservatism