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

'Susan Oliver's Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland represents an important contribution to the field, as it makes a compelling case for what at first may seem a surprising addition to the list of eco-conscious Romantics: the estate-owning Tory, Walter Scott. Yet Oliver provides a fascinating and comprehensive assessment of his work from an environmental perspective, which demonstrates the full extent of his contribution to early nineteenth-century ecological theory and historiography.' Kenneth McNeil, The Wordsworth Circle

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]