Dani Napton

Place in Charlotte Smith's The Banished Man and Walter Scott's Woodstock

Smith’s The Banished Man and Scott’s Woodstock contain a considered analysis of the social impacts of revolution and the potential for ideology to warp into an ugly reality of principles abandoned. The concept of place is intrinsic to each author’s arguments and can be explored through Malpasian concepts of regional mapping and nesting as the means for tracing the developments and the consequences of revolution in these two novels. J. E. Malpas’s notions of place form a prism through which to view both Smith’s and Scott’s explorations of the various ideological stances and associated domestic and political issues. In The Banished Man, Smith uses place to construct a revolutionary position grounded in cosmopolitanism. Scott’s focus on place enables him to establish a very different argument in Woodstock, maintaining a counterrevolutionary position but a wary, qualified one.