Writing against the Grain: Walter Scott's The Talisman

Abstract

This study investigates Walter Scott's novel The Talisman from a postcolonial perspective. It consists of four parts: the reception of the novel's Arabic translation, Scott's historicism, especially Edward Said's dis/valuation of it, Scott's representation of Saladin as universal man, and a critical analysis of Scott's attempt to break new ground and write against the grain in the heyday of empire, and to liberate the image of the East from the lingering medieval prejudices. The article's thesis is that Scott's historicism does not adhere to the early-nineteenth-century trend of Orientalism as proposed by Said. It aims at presenting a different perspective on Scott’s work: that the East meets the West in the space of The Talisman in an archetypal civilisational dialogue in which Scott revisits history in order to connect it teleologically with the present and the future. .