ABSTRACT
The reason commonly given by those who have attempted to read a novel in the Waverley series and retired defeated, is that they find Walter Scott's style long-winded and unwieldy. In an article based on computer analysis of the prose style of Scott and several of his contemporaries and immediate successors, Frederick Burwick has demonstrated that Scott's dominant narrative mode is the Ciceronian grand style. Scott's narrative mode appears to have the aim of keeping his readers at a distance from the events of the stories. The distinctive style, challenging but rewarding, of the Waverley Novels is devised, then, to be capable of including a wide range of rhetorics, and to afford constantly varied entertainment for a remarkably wide spread of readers. A crucial element in the texture of the Waverley Novels is Scott's pervasive use of images: there are over 6500 of the Author's own, and many more introduced to the narration by way of intertextual allusions and quotations.
