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This book has two main related purposes. The first is to provide a fresh and thoroughly documented study of elements of the background to Scott's life and art that have often been overlooked or taken for granted: his politics and his relation to the major intellectual currents of the age and to the Scottish social background. From this study, Scott emerges as a more understandable and less trivial politician and observer of his contemporary scene, both privately and in public. The second part of the book uses this background to sketch an artistic development in the novels. Dr McMaster shows how Scott's deepening response to what he saw as an ever more troubled world led him from the strict realism of his early works to a mature synthesis of realistic, poetic and symbolic modes.