Balance history and fiction in narrative: Approaching Walter Scott’s classical historical novels

Abstract Water Scott sets up the literary genre with his outstanding and genuine composition of twenty-seven historical novels. With unique and tactical narrative strategies, Scott successfully balances the real historical world and the fictional world in the stories. Scrutinizing from four aspects, namely plotting, narrative time, narrator and focalization, and characterization, the present paper will reveal how the history is told in a fictional world without losing the historicity and keeping the vividness at the same time. Taking the faithfulness to history as the major principle, Scott fabricates a fascinating fictional world embedded with his understanding and emotions of the past.