Handing Over Walter Scott?
Abstract
This essay reassesses Scott's 'handing down' strategy in a Romantic context, from his 'multi-handed' authorial technique and his staging of the transmission process into publication, to the role of the often-intrusive hand of the translator and the question of the variability of the text. The essay begins by exploring the author's fetishization of the hand motif and the way it reflects on his own writing practices. Affected from an early age by chilblains, Scott literally had to rely on helping hands all through his career. As a writer, his relationship to the hand and the act of writing was therefore paradoxical. The hand as a motif in Scott's writing is shown to be displaced from its physical manifestation into the realm of metaphor, and from the literal to the aesthetic and poetic spheres.