The Heart of Mid-Lothian / Edition 1

by Walter Scott, Alison Lumsden, David Hewitt

Overview

Find Out What Scott Really WroteGoing back to the original manuscripts, a team of scholars has uncovered what Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production. The Heart of Mid-Lothian is precisely focused on the trials for murder of John Porteous and of Effie Deans in 1736 and 1737. Yet it is a chronicle - Scott's only chronicle - which spans the eighty years of the life of David Deans, whose death takes place in 1751. The most complex of all Scott's narratives, it is also the most challenging in that it raises in an acute fashion the problem of a judicial system that does not produce justice. Scott places this fundamental issue in its immediate political context, in history as represented by the life of Deans, and alongside the justice of Providence as perceived by his daughter Jeanie, the greatest of Scott's heroines.The Edinburgh Edition of The Heart of Mid-Lothian provides a new text, and in its annotation treats compr

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748605705
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2004
Series:	Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels , #6
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	792
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alison Lumsden is Senior Lecturer, Department of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen David Hewitt is Regius Chalmers Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Editorial Reviews

The Edinburgh Edition… aims to rescue these superb works of fiction from an unfortunate history of errors...…A huge project, very scholarly, and altogether very grand indeed… it is perhaps Scott's most profound novel, being a considered meditation on the nature of justice… the novel is, above all, a superb story with a cast of rich characters.

Harry Reid

By comparing the first edition of Scott's famous work to the manuscript, the editors of this excellent edition produce 'an ideal first edition.'

Choice

I recommend the book to admirers of Scott and to those who, like me, have never read his work but always felt they should.

The Historical Novels Review - Sue Asher

The present volume offers the modern reader a version very close to that a reader in 1818 would have experienced...Highly recommended.

Edinburgh University Press

From the Publisher