ABSTRACT
Walter Scott's Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since is important to the history of the novel less for its own merit than as the first, pattern-setting work in the series known collectively as the Waverley novels, arguably the most influential novel series in world literature. The series was a best-selling publishing phenomenon in Britain in its own time, showing the ideological power and literary potential of this popular but hitherto disregarded literary genre. More important, the characteristics of the Waverley novels were imitated and appropriated by writers in many countries for the purpose of constructing romantic nationalism, or what Benedict Anderson calls the "imagined community" of the modern nation-state (Imagined Communities, I983, expanded I99I). Finally, to a Marxist critic like Georg Lukacs (I937), the Waverley novels founded the historical novel that embodied and disseminated the ideology of the bourgeoisie as a world-historical revolutionary class.
