| Resum: |
Scott's Ivanhoe is more than a literary landmark or relic. The ideologicai work done by the novel has been underrated. Ivanhoe is a memorable narrative of a national myth: the synthesis of England from Norman and Saxon peoples. It contributed to the making and circulation of the analogous idea of a «British» nation during the imperial era. Highly popular in Europe, it provided a paradigm for imagining a synthetic nation bringing apparently opposed interests together. The historical fictions of the novel reflect a number of Scott's anxieties about contemporary political issues. Class conflict is displaced by the opposition of national and the alien. Scott's use of the Robin Hood legend demonstrates how he adapted his material: the first writer to link Robin Hood to a surviving Saxon resistance, Scott appears to combat Ritson's account of Robin as radical folk-hero by presenting him as a figure co-operating in a a natural community linking ail levels of society in resistance to that which is foreign, cosmopolitan, without stake in the land. The figures in the novel who cannot be accomodated within the newly imagined state must be defeated and exiled. Rebecca, as Jew, representative of commerce and science and perhaps as sexualized femaie, is multiply alien to the nation as imagined. Read critically, Ivanhoe continues to be an instructive text. |
visitant ::
identificació
