Sir Walter Scott
2
3.9
- proper noun
- One of the most famous works of Sir Walter Scott is the historical novel 'Ivanhoe'.
Examples
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Traces themes of right, justice, and power in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and argues that Scott's work contributed to the creation of a new discourse and reform of crime and punishment during his lifetime.
Academic text (1993) -
Duncan also examines the contribution of the romance to the genesis of the novel as literature's dominant form, exploring texts by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, among others.
Academic text (1993) -
The first are the "traditional" ballads collected by antiquaries such as Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson, Charlotte Brooke, and Sir Walter Scott, the appeal of which was that they were ancient, a kind of poetry that tied the present to the past in ways that writers then, as now, found fascinating.
Academic text (2016) -
Ferris investigates the contributions of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels—replete with their complex themes of genre and gender—to the formation of modern literature.
Academic text (1993) -
When Sir Walter Scott places Leicester and Raleigh, the lion-hearted Richard, or the stately Elizabeth, on his painted page, we are charmed by the verisimilitude of his characters and elevated by the moral combination of the incidents his fertile imagination supplies.
Academic text (2016) -
Students often study the poetry and prose of Sir Walter Scott in literature classes.
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The influence of Sir Walter Scott on the development of the historical novel is widely recognized.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Sir + Walter + Scott
This is a proper name referring to a specific historical person; while a learner who knows 'Sir' can infer a titled person, the given information that he is a British author (and his life dates) is encyclopedic and cannot be derived from the arbitrary names 'Walter' and 'Scott'. Because the MWE's meaning depends on world/cultural knowledge rather than compositional semantics, it is not predictable from its parts.
Etymology
Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish writer who loved old songs and history and turned them into exciting stories about the past. Because he mixed real events with adventure, people call him the 'father of the historical novel', so his name now stands for that kind of book.