A bestselling author in his own time and long after‎,‎ Sir Walter Scott was not only a writer of thrilling tales of romance and adventure but also an insightful historical thinker and literary craftsman‎.‎ Over the last two decades‎,‎ scholars have come to see him as an important figure in Romantic‎-period literature‎,‎ Scottish literature and the development of the historical novel‎.‎ Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory builds on this renewed appreciation of Scott‎'‎s importance by viewing his most significant novels ‎- from Waverley and Rob Royto Ivanhoe‎,‎Redgauntlet‎,‎ and beyond ‎- through the lens of contemporary critical theory‎.‎ By juxtaposing pairings of Scott‎'‎s early and later novels with major contemporary theoretical concepts and the work of such thinkers as Alain Badiou‎,‎ Judith Butler‎,‎ Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek‎,‎ this book uses theory to illuminate the complexities of Scott‎'‎s fictions‎,‎ while simultaneously using Scott‎'‎s fictions to explain and explore the state of contemporary theory‎.‎