ABSTRACT
Walter Scott is not the first author that comes to mind when one is drawing up a pantheon of postmoderns. Despite the enormous admiration that writers such as Jane Austen and George Eliot professed for his writing in his lifetime, subsequent criticism has tended to treat Scott's popularity and success as the mark of something less than high seriousness. Modernity, modernist historicism, fails to correspond with or to itself because of the way a certain effect of the "post" introduces a temporal slippage to modernity. Modernity spreads with the "post". The importance of Scott lies with his generic exploration of the historical romance: of a novelistic form that seems to contradict itself from the start by virtue of a double insistence. Scott matters precisely because the encounter between history and romance in his writings takes place among a multitude of explicitly textual frames dedicatory epistles, introductions, postscripts, prefaces, footnotes, appendices.
