Introduction

Gendering Walter Scott is intended to form part of the consolidation of Scott's critical reputation, by exploring aspects of his work neglected because of the trajectory of gender studies in relation to Scott studies, and by linking these to a concept of the Romantic period increasingly uncoupled from the dominance of canonical poets. The advent of feminist criticism in the 1970s and 1980s might have been expected to open up gender criticism of Scott, but this was a long time coming. By the 1990s, much gender theory had developed in the direction of studies of the body politic, with varying emphasis on one or other half of that phrase, as signalled by Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism, which engages copiously with Scott. Scott is often exploiting alternative ways of viewing both sexes' transgressions of gender barriers through a silent slippage between two models of sexual difference such as: single-sex model and two-sex model.