Scott Unbound

‘Scott Unbound’ shows how thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in a disaggregated, messy and material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help us to think differently about the immense cross-class popularity of Walter Scott’s work. Right from the start, Scott’s powerful Romantic presence as the literary author of books rested on ‘Scott’ as a multimedia phenomenon. Taking the nineteenth-century print serial seriously challenges assumptions about what a ‘book’ might be. By unbinding Scott’s work, this chapter disperses his texts and restores them to their original promiscuous sociability. The Romantic idea of the author is complicated through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the North’ (a.k.a. Walter Scott), and the phenomenon of ‘Scott’ in the early nineteenth century is produced by the generative possibilities of the serial more than has been previously recognized.