Lampedusa, Scott, the Historical Novel and Identity

Walter Scott is generally regarded as the first true historical novelist whereas Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, on other hand, has been accused of not writing a historical novel despite setting his novel, The Leopard, in the past. This chapter examines Lampedusa’s lecture on Scott in his Letteratura Inglese and asks what it might tell us about how Lampedusa saw the historical novel and how this might affect our reading of The Leopard. In particular it addresses the issue of how their novels express and reflect respectively Scottish and Sicilian national identity.