ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book includes a collection of essays and reviews in three sections, each of which reflects a predominant purpose. It contains the introductory essays which Sir Walter Scott contributed to Ballantyne's Novelists Library: these represent his mature thought on some of the most eminent writers of the generations preceding his own. The book also includes the reviews of books published during Scott's lifetime. It also contains a selection of passages from the prefaces and introductions which he wrote for his own novels and shows. Scott's closeness to, and involvement with, the fiction of preceding generations is partly responsible for the unique challenge which his criticism presents to twentieth-century assumptions about the origins and development of the English novel.
