Walter Scott at 250 - by Caroline McCracken-Flesher & Matthew Wickman (Paperback)

About the Book

At 250, Walter Scott points toward our possible futures.

Book Synopsis

At 250, Walter Scott points toward our possible futures. Scott, although we necessarily look on his times as past, of course experienced them as present. His times were times of crisis. Scott, then, has much to share in the experience, narration, anticipation and response to change as a condition of life - a condition our era, with its existential challenges to climate, to public health, to civilization knows only too well. In Scott at 250, major scholars foreground the author as theorist of tomorrow - as the surveyor of the complexities of the present who also gazes, as we do, toward an anxious and hopeful future.

From the Back Cover

Walter Scott in the twenty-first century In Scott at 250, major scholars revisit Walter Scott as a theorist of tomorrow, as the surveyor of the complexities of the present who also gazes, as we do, toward an anxious and hopeful future. Ten original essays explore new ideas on the novel, temporality and Scott's playful textuality, as well as introducing the women of Abbotsford. Scott has much to share in the experience, narration, anticipation and response to change as a condition of life - a condition our era, with its existential challenges to climate, to public health, to civilisation knows only too well. Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Global Studies at the University of Wyoming. Matthew Wickman is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and Founding Director of the BYU Humanities Center.

Review Quotes

'Correctly identifying Scott in 1825 as "undoubtedly the most popular writer of the age", William Hazlitt also lodged a complaint against him: "He is just half what the human intellect is capable of being: if you take the universe, and divide it into two parts, he knows all that it has been; all that it is to be is nothing to him." But then, rephrasing, Hazlitt produces a pithier and more apt formulation, calling Scott a "prophesier of things past". Without citing Hazlitt's punchline, this commemorative anthology of essays teases out its implications. This book is a thoughtful and provocative exploration of how reading Scott might matter going forward - for futures past, and passing, and to come.'--James Chandler, The University of Chicago

About the Author

Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. She runs the University of Wyoming in Scotland program and directs UW's Center for Global Studies. Her books include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford, 2005), The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Novels (Oxford, 2012), the edited volumes Culture, Nation and the New Scottish Parliament (Bucknell, 2007), Scotland As Science Fiction (Bucknell, 2012), and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (MLA, 2013). Her edition of Stevenson's Kidnapped is forthcoming from EUP.

Matthew Wickman is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and Founding Director of the BYU Humanities Center. He is the author of Literature after Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), The Ruins of Experience: Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness (Pennsylvania, 2007), and many articles on Scottish literary and intellectual history and in other fields across the interdisciplinary humanities.