Logo image
Walter Scott, Community Building, and Waverly, South Carolina
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Walter Scott, Community Building, and Waverly, South Carolina

Anne Mckee Stapleton
Philological quarterly, Vol.104(3), pp.395-414
06/01/2025

View Online

Abstract

Overlooked in discussions of Walter Scott's influence in the South, Waverly, South Carolina, exemplifies his complicated and paradoxical legacy. This essay explores how an onomastic connection to Scott's Waverley novels, community building, and movements for social justice intersect in this community, Columbia's first suburb. Originally an antebellum plantation named Waverly in honor of Scott's global bestselling Waverley novels, by the early twentieth century, the neighborhood was a thriving, self-sustaining Black community that valued and promoted education, Black agency, and meaningful change. Bound to Scott's literary inheritance by name, Waverly exemplifies his paradoxical legacy, which, for some Southerners, included notions of antiquated chivalry, but, for others, meant eschewing racial oppression by imagining and building a promising future out of a turbulent past.
Social Sciences Arts & Humanities Language & Linguistics Linguistics Literature

Details

Metrics

1 Record Views
Logo image