Sir Walter Scott and the Transgression of Anachronistic Borders: The Ideological Fantasy of Westphalian Sovereignty in The Talisman
2017; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10509585.2017.1289927
ISSN1740-4657
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies of British Isles
ResumoTwentieth-century literary scholarship traditionally viewed Sir Walter Scott’s novels as central in popularizing a cogent, British ideology of nationalism—a view challenged in recent scholarship by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Ian Duncan, Julian Meldon D’Arcy, and others. Instead, Scott’s oeuvre reveals how Scottishness is essential to—and not elided in—the project of Great Britain. The problematic “unified” vision of a British nation-state and imagined community relies on the myth of Westphalian sovereignty, which, resulting from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, posits that a state’s power is limited only by geographic borders. However, Scott’s The Talisman anachronistically imposes the nation-state model on a Crusaders’ camp in twelfth-century Palestine; the camp’s porous borders exacerbate what Freud terms the “narcissism of minor differences” between European nations. The Talisman reveals the failure of ideological fantasies like the nation-state and Westphalian sovereignty: because characters like Saladin and the Scottish Sir Kenneth transgress borders, The Talisman reveals that nation-states succeed only by initiating exchanges with their global and local peripheries. Countering Edward Said’s dismissal of The Talisman, this essay reassesses Scott’s nationalism by critiquing his anachronistic nation-state proxy (i.e., the Crusaders’ camp) through an interdisciplinary framework of literary criticism, geography, and international relations theory.
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