Interspecific Force in Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8864052 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lorna Fitzsimmons (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 98 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 410-425 |
| Publication date | 2017-04-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2017.1294401 |
| OpenAlex | W2604625046 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 31 |
This article argues that Scott’s conceptualisation of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) as “being ‘in a light-horseman sort of stanza’” is metonymic of the interspecific force dynamics that he evokes in representing relations with non-human animals in the poem. Integrating force dynamics into the ecocritical agenda can serve as a means to move beyond anthropocentrism, as well as the binarised assumption that there exists an environmental intrinsicality, by shifting the focus of attention to relational interfaces. Resistance to or exertion of physical force is, in many instances of Scott’s work, an instantiation of hierarchicalised relationships between human and non-human animals or categories of the human. Analysis of the light-horseman trope frames the examination of force dynamics in the representation of a horse, a dog and birds in The Lay. Comparative analyses of selected scenes representing non-human animals in The Lady of the Lake (1810), Waverley (1814) and The Black Dwarf (1816) suggest continuities and changes in Scott’s representation of the non-human animal in subsequent years
Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Art · Biology · Dynamics (music · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Focus (optics · Interspecific competition · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Metonymy · Poetry · Political science · Representation (politics · Sociology · Trope (literature · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Travel Writing and Literature · Ecology · Law · Philosophy
The Politics of Romantic Poetry
The Invention of the Countryside
Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter
Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Metaphors We Live By
British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
The Biopolitical Unconscious
Blameless Empires and Long-Forgotten Melodies
Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature
The Isle Reader
Romanticism and Animal Rights
Writing for an Endangered World
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious 1905
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |