Sir Walter Scott and European Literature: The Example of Cervantes and the Cervantean Tradition

The present article tries to examine the weight of the British and European Cervantean tradition in the early novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Through the analysis of the recognizable presence of Cervantean elements characteristic of Cervantes’s eighteenth-century emulators in novels such as Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816), this article will try to demonstrate how Scott’s early novel-writing possesses a clear transnational and European flavor, despite its evident local tone. Scott is thus not only the creator of a new novelistic genre capable of portraying Scottish history and its peculiarities, but also an important link in a novelistic tradition which will spread over Europe from the seventeenth century onwards: the Cervantean tradition.