Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832: An Edinburgh Keepsake.

Published in 1971 by Oliver and Boyd for Edinburgh University Press, Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832: An Edinburgh Keepsake was assembled to mark the bicentenary of the birth of the city's most celebrated man of letters. Edited by Allan Frazer, the volume gathers commemorative essays and critical appraisals from a distinguished group of contributors, who consider in turn Scott's life, his poetry, the Waverley novels, his role in shaping the modern historical novel, and the place he came to occupy in nineteenth-century European culture. The collection's most enduring piece is C.S. Lewis's essay on Scott, in which Lewis defends Scott's narrative gifts and his broader literary stature against the diminishments of mid-twentieth-century criticism, and which has since been reprinted in collections of Lewis's literary writings. A handsomely produced bicentenary volume, the Edinburgh Keepsake stands both as a record of how Scott was being read and assessed in his native city two hundred years after his birth and, for collectors of C.S. Lewis, as a significant first appearance of one of his shorter critical works.