Walter Scott was acutely conscious of the fictionality of his "historical" narratives. Assuming Scott's keen awareness of the problems of historical representation, James Kerr reads the Waverley novels as a grand fictional project constructed around the relationship between the language of fiction and the historical reality. Scott deliberately played fiction and history off against one another; and we can see throughout his novels a tension between the romancer, recasting the events of the past in accordance with recognizably literary logics, and the historian, presenting an accurate account...