Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland

"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 systematically 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 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 Professor of Literature and Dean of Research in 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)"--