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

Demonstrates how Walter Scott, one of Romanticism's most globally influential authors, put Scotland's ecologies at the heart of nineteenth-century writing.

Susan Oliver (Author)

9781108831574, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 August 2021

220 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.502 kg

'… an ambitious book, in dialogue throughout with recent work on nature and land ethics … [that] lays down an important challenge and an invitation to further studies.' Kathryn Sutherland, The Times Literary Supplement

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.

1. Introduction: Walter Scott and the Environment
2. Shifting Ecologies: Grasslands, Rivers and Shorelines
3. Toxic Ecologies, Ecogothic, and Violence Against the Land
4. Wild Places, Rarity and Extinction
5. Trees
6. Stone, Water, Air.

Subject Areas: Poetry by individual poets [DCF], Poetry [DC], Literature & literary studies [D]