Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland

Emergent Ecologies of a Nation

Susan Oliver

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781108831574
• eBook ISBN: 9781108934657
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology of Works Referenced
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Walter Scott and the Environment
• Chapter 2 Shifting Ecologies: Grasslands, Rivers and Shorelines
• Chapter 3 Toxic Ecologies, Ecogothic and Violence against the Land
• Chapter 4 Wild Places, Rarity and Extinction
• Chapter 5 Trees
• Chapter 6 Stone, Water, Air
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index