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

Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland shows how one of the most globally influential authors of the nineteenth century wrote a nation’s ecologies into the history of environmental literature. Farmed environments, mountains, moors and forests along with rivers, shorelines, islands and the sea are systematically explored throughout this book, situating Scott’s writing about shared human and nonhuman environments in the context of an emerging Anthropocene epoch. Susan Oliver attends to changes and losses that act 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 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.