Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation

Description

The work of Walter Scott, one of the most globally influential authors of the nineteenth century, provides us with a unique narrative of the changing ecologies of Scotland over several centuries and writes this narrative into the history of environmental literature. Farmed environments, mountains, moors and forests along with rivers, shorelines, islands and oceans are explored, situating Scott's writing about shared human and nonhuman environments in the context of the emerging Anthropocene. Susan Oliver attends to changes and losses acting in counterpoint to the narratives of 'improvement' that underpin modernization in land management. She investigates the imaginative ecologies of folklore and local culture. Each chapter establishes a dialogue between ecocritical theory and Scott as storyteller of social history. This is a book that shows how Scott challenged conventional assumptions about the permanency of stone and the evanescence of air; it begins with the land and ends by looking at the stars.

Susan Oliver is Deputy Dean (Research) at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Essex. She is the winner of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay prize for Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (2006), and is also the editor of The Yearbook of English Studies: New Approaches to Walter Scott (2017).

'Lucidly written and theoretically informed, this study asserts the vital relationships between literature, social history, and the natural world ... Highly recommended.' E. Kraft, Choice Connect 'Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland shows that corrections to modernity's excesses emerged simultaneously within the discourse of modernity, countering a false triumphalist narrative of linear progress toward liberal social economies. In laying the foundation for this kind of reassessment, Oliver has published an important work that scholars will find rewarding for years to come.' J. Andrew Hubbell, Modern Philology