Romancing the Novel: Adventures from Scott to Sebald

Romancing the Novel examines the ways in which romance forms the characteristic boys’ books - as exemplified in the novels of Scott, Dumas, Verne, and Stephenson - influence narratives not generally put in the same category - both in psychoanalytic accounts of the psyche and in novels by George Eliot, Ursula Le Guin, Joseph Conrad, and W.G. Sebald. Adventure privileges masculinity but also reveals an extraordinary ambivalence toward it, since the truly seductive masculine figures in such fictions are always finally exiled from the center of the social consensus. Moreover, the use of the romantic plot creates narrative distortions and ethical dilemmas that repeat across time and genre. It remains impossible to imagine a female hero on the model of Scott’s blank hero (in Lukacs term): girls and women are required to be hard-working, clever, and resourceful, while boys and men succeed merely by being. Centuries after Scott, the recognizable codes of gender and class he inaugurated continue our sense of the narratable.