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Scott and Shorter Fiction

The first chapter of this book positions Walter Scott within his historical arena of short prose writing, and then in a broader nineteenth-century survey in Scotland. By any formal or generic definition it is clear that Scott’s shorter fictions came in different shapes and sizes, and live in different types of publications. Even completed novels were augmented with snatches of new prose that ought to be treated as separate stories. However, Scott has been all but ignored by historians of the short story, for whom the modern form only emerged with the Victorians. While it may be true that some authors increasingly identified as short story writers by profession after the 1880s, the variegated format of Scott’s short-form fiction fits with, but also complicates, standard definitions. Placing Scott and his peers astride competing oral and print traditions as practiced in the earlier part of the century, we can more readily appreciate their adaptation of the sketch, the sketch-like tale, and other misunderstood types of shorter fiction.