Paul Scott: A Critical Study

By Francine S. Weinbaum

When The Jewel in the Crown aired on British and American television in the early 1980s, many people who had never read Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, on which it is based, became engrossed in his sweeping tale of India in the waning days of the Raj. At the same time, however, some literary critics, displaying a scholarly prejudice against popular success, dismissed the literary worth of Scott's novels. In this comprehensive study of all thirteen Scott novels, Francine Weinbaum takes issue with these critics and makes a persuasive claim for The Raj Quartet as a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature. After a biographical chapter, Weinbaum discusses Scott's earlier novels as thematic and technical precursors of The Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils). She traces in the Quartet a dynamic of reality and illusion that underlies the protagonists' struggle for love, the antagonists' striving for power and privilege, and the central theme of the search for union between England and India, whites and nonwhites, and soul and body. A final chapter demonstrates how the protagonists of the early and middle novel--repressed, depressed, introverted, and inadequate figures--are transformed into the life-affirming, tragic figures of The Raj Quartet, who are imprisoned not so much by psychological forces as by historical and social ones. In exploring the theme of thwarted union in The Raj Quartet and relating it to Scott's own life and inner world, Weinbaum opens a new door into the works of Paul Scott for both scholars and the reading public.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0292765398
• ISBN13: 9780292765399
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"