War and protoecological views in Walter Scott’s novels

Until recently, Walter Scott’s work coursed mostly under the radar of ecocritical criticism. Scott’s poetry was influenced at the beginning of his career by his own translations of German poetry and especially of Goethe, who has been associated with a protoecological view on nature, his works detailing “the material interactions of living and non-living things” (Sullivan 18), features which pertain to what Timothy Morton defined as a ‘mesh’ of agential processes. While Scott’s own poems may be taken into account by ecocriticism, his ‘historical’ novel is laden with so much about former conflicts, political and economic forces that it seems to be very wide off the ecological mark. Yet, his human-nature engagements evince a complex interdependence which might be rewarding in an ecocritical reading. Scott’s novels reveal an ecological thought in which intrasubjectivity and intersubjectivity are important and are part of a fictional network of interdependencies, which contains more than the ramifications of a reduced ‘mesh’, understood simply in terms of material codependency and coexistence. There is no abrupt nature-culture separation in his work, as his views are shaped by his Scottish Enlightenment/Romanticism heritage. Irony and humour are an integral part of his protoecological vision, emphasizing the moral responsibility humans have as humble stewards of the earth.