ABSTRACT
The historical novel as developed in Europe and America in the early nineteenth century by Walter Scott and his followers is usually seen as the product of the new or heightened sense of history, and especially of national history, engendered by the mass revolutions, both political and industrial, of the late eighteenth century. In his seminal Work on the subject, Georg Lukács presents this view in a remarkably specific and concrete form, arguing that the new national—historical consciousness was partly the result of a perceived practical necessity: after the French Revolution governments could no longer rely on small professional armies to fight their wars and thus had to resort to nationalist propaganda to persuade their citizens to enlist (Lukács 1962: 23-6). As a consequence the period 1789-1814 witnessed the birth of the modern mass consciousness of nationhood and national history: history was no longer merely the story of kings and queens or of the rise and fall of royal dynasties. It was now conceived of as the 'story of the nation' (i.e., of the whole people) and no literary medium was better able to capture the full expanse of this story than the sprawling nineteenth-century novel, which potentially could present convincing images of all levels of society in all historical periods. The year 1814 was a significant one in this respect both for the fall of the last great pan-European empire-builder, Napoleon (whose imperial ambitions posed the last great threat to German, Italian and East European nation-builders), and for the publication of Scott's Waverley, the first novel imbued with a modern national—historical consciousness.
