Dr Ann Rigney (Chair of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University): "Where Walter Scott meets the Mahatma: Reflections on Transnational Literature"

7:00 pm - 9:00 pm, Monday, January 12. 7000 Earl & Jennie Lohn Policy Room, SFU Harbour Cente, 515 W. Hastings St., Vancouver.

A recent book by Robert Crawford (2013) has claimed that Walter Scott was one of the first writers to address a global audience. In this presentation, Dr Rigney provided a critical exploration of Scott as a ‘global’ writer by examining the productive reception of his work in British-controlled India. With reference to writers working in Bengali, Urdu and Gujarati, Dr Rigney showed how Scott’s work was translated, adapted, and appropriated as an imaginative resource in formulating an anti-colonial counter-memory that Scott himself could not have anticipated but might perhaps have welcomed.