Susan Oliver
In addition to my main research interests in late-eighteenth-century and Romantic period literature, transatlantic studies, periodical culture, and environmental writing, I also work on the more general literature and culture of the long nineteenth century.
My current research projects include the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust funded "Green Scott: Walter Scott's Environmentalism and Writing the Ecologies of a Nation."
The British Academy awarded me the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2007) for my book Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter. I have published many journal articles and book chapters on British Romantic literature, American nineteenth-century writing, and am completing a monograph on transatlantic periodical culture.
Professionally, I serve on the Executive Committees of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), the MLA Scottish Literature Forum, and on the Advisory Committee for the MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography. I'm also Senior Bibliographer for the MLA International Bibliography, having been a Bibliography Fellow and Bibliographer since 2005.
Recent fellowships include: the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library Company of Philadelphia, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library, Visiting Fellow in Literary Studies at the University of Wyoming, Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, the MLA International Bibliography, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.
I am Honorary Fellow in Literary Studies in the Department of English, University of Wyoming, and a Senior Member of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.
Address: Wivenhoe, Essex
My current research projects include the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust funded "Green Scott: Walter Scott's Environmentalism and Writing the Ecologies of a Nation."
The British Academy awarded me the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2007) for my book Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter. I have published many journal articles and book chapters on British Romantic literature, American nineteenth-century writing, and am completing a monograph on transatlantic periodical culture.
Professionally, I serve on the Executive Committees of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), the MLA Scottish Literature Forum, and on the Advisory Committee for the MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography. I'm also Senior Bibliographer for the MLA International Bibliography, having been a Bibliography Fellow and Bibliographer since 2005.
Recent fellowships include: the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library Company of Philadelphia, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library, Visiting Fellow in Literary Studies at the University of Wyoming, Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, the MLA International Bibliography, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.
I am Honorary Fellow in Literary Studies in the Department of English, University of Wyoming, and a Senior Member of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.
Address: Wivenhoe, Essex
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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.
Chapters:
1. Introduction: North, South, East — and West; The Strangeness of ‘Debateable Lands’.
2. Collecting Ballads and Resisting Radical Energies: Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
3. Scott’s Narrative Poetry: The Borders and the Highland Margins.
4. Crossing ‘Dark Barriers’: Byron, Europe and the Near East in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos 1 and 2.
5. Byron’s Eastern Tales: Eastern Themes and Contexts.
Edited Journal Special Issues
Section 1. WALTER SCOTT: TRANSMISSION AND AFTERLIVES
Section 2. THEORETICAL APPROACHES AND GENRE
Section 3. SCOTT'S POETRY
Section 4. HISTORY AND SITES OF CONFLICT
Section 5. LITERARY GEOGRAPHIES AND ECOCRITICISM
Contents::
Section 1
"Six Degrees from Walter Scott: Separation, Connection and the Abbotsford Visitor Books." Caroline McCracken-Flesher.
The ‘universal favourite’: Daniel Terry's Guy Mannering; or, The Gipsey's Prophecy (1816). Annika Bautz.
“Handing Over Walter Scott? The Writer's Hand on the English and French Marketplace.” Céline Sabiron.
Section 2
“Vanishing Mediators and Modes of Existence in Walter Scott's The Monastery.” Evan Gottlieb.
“‘In Contrast to Those Whom We Have Called Materialists, Mr. [Scott] Is Spiritual’: On Scott and Woolf, Romance and ‘Fullness of Life.’” Matthew Wickman.
“The Politics of Fear: Gothic Histories, the English Civil War and Walter Scott's Woodstock.” Fiona Price.
Section 3
“Towards the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry.” Alison Lumsden.
“‘Land Debateable’: The Supernatural in Scott's Narrative Poetry.” Ainsley McIntosh.
“The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Improvisatory Authorship.” Daniel Cook.
Section 4
“Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary and the Ossian Controversy.” Nigel Leask.
“‘This Right of Mercy’: The Royal Pardon in The Heart of Midlothian.” Tara Ghoshal Wallace.
“Sir Walter Scott and the Caribbean: Unravelling the Silences.” Carla Sassi.
Section 5
“‘All That Is Curious on Continent and Isle’: Time, Place, and Modernity in Scott's ‘Vacation 1814’ and The Pirate.” Penny Fielding.
“Scott, India and Australia.” Graham Tulloch.
“Trees, Rivers, and Stories: Walter Scott Writing the Land.” Susan Oliver.
Journal articles and book chapters
Please contact author (Susan Oliver) for more information.
shape the ways in which magazines in North America and Britain represented the natural environment? To what extent did periodicals contribute to the growth of armchair tourism and a public desire to encounter, through reading, a world beyond urban and metropolitan lifestyles? What difference did newspapers and magazines make to
the way people thought about the natural world? This chapter investigates the emergence during the long nineteenth century of a culture of environmental journalism, paying attention to different kinds of writing that reflected progressive debates about botany, wilderness, land-use change and aesthetics. The focus is on the development of a transatlantic environmental imaginary not constrained by (although it may have
acknowledged or assented to the growth of) national interests. Then, as now, environmental journalism was far from being a unifi ed genre. Rather, it comprised a more or less thematically connected set of writings that operated across a range of different kinds of publication. Newspapers, magazines, special interest and professional journals, some with extravagant illustrations and others with little or no graphic content,
provided a multimedial network through which ideas about natural science, domestic landscapes, pastoralism and wilderness were shared and discussed.
economic structure and ecology of Scotland. This article explores Scott's attention to the rise of a modern forestry industry in Scotland that took place as part of a wider growth in British imports of trees (live and as timber) from Canada.
The English Illustrated Magazine was a late Victorian periodical that published fiction and poetry from contributors including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Walter Swinburne. Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Walter Crane were amongst its illustrators (Crane also contributed poetry). Art and theatre critic, writer, and pre-Raphaelite advocate Joseph Comyns Carr was editor from 1883 until 1889. The characteristic of the magazine therefore encouraged readers to think imaginatively about the content, within a framework of mystery, fantasy, and an idealised approach to beauty.
The curiosity with which readers of British and North American magazines regarded writing about Morocco, and other North African countries, is documented through the many articles and accompanying illustrations. Those accounts usually portray Morocco as a contentious but at the same time desirable marginal zone where a familiar Europe confronts alterity in Africa or the Maghreb. Another more complex matter is the extent to which the Morocco described in the textual space of magazines functioned as a viable place of transculturation, or a contact zone in which the subject asserted a degree of autonomy. Such autonomy was limited, not least because the language and literary techniques used in the press repeatedly inscribed a colonialist agenda. Travel writer, novelist, poet and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich ironically repudiated those conventions at the beginning of his article about Morocco in the New York based Harper’s Magazine in 1881. Whilst complaining he was “tired of African travelers. One always knows beforehand what they have in their pack,” Aldrich begins with a counterintuitive perspective, in which Morocco provides the means to critically confront other writing about Africa. This essay explores the extent to which magazine articles about Morocco, in the years preceding National Geographic, challenged or retuned to the modes of viewing North Africa from which authors so often expressed a desire to escape.
the walker of the streets. In recent years, and in line with a resurgence of
theoretical and historical interest in walking in cities, scholars including Felicity
James and Simon Hull have explored Lamb‘s importance as a successor to
eighteenth-century English magazine writers such as Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele, and as a forerunner of the mid-century continental flâneur. The matter of where to take studies of the 'Elia‘ essays following recent attention raises the question of Lamb‘s place in the relationship between British and North American writing. This article shows how, as writers about cities, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson took up the idea of the roving reporter that Lamb - along with William Hazlitt - began in London.
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.
Chapters:
1. Introduction: North, South, East — and West; The Strangeness of ‘Debateable Lands’.
2. Collecting Ballads and Resisting Radical Energies: Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
3. Scott’s Narrative Poetry: The Borders and the Highland Margins.
4. Crossing ‘Dark Barriers’: Byron, Europe and the Near East in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos 1 and 2.
5. Byron’s Eastern Tales: Eastern Themes and Contexts.
Section 1. WALTER SCOTT: TRANSMISSION AND AFTERLIVES
Section 2. THEORETICAL APPROACHES AND GENRE
Section 3. SCOTT'S POETRY
Section 4. HISTORY AND SITES OF CONFLICT
Section 5. LITERARY GEOGRAPHIES AND ECOCRITICISM
Contents::
Section 1
"Six Degrees from Walter Scott: Separation, Connection and the Abbotsford Visitor Books." Caroline McCracken-Flesher.
The ‘universal favourite’: Daniel Terry's Guy Mannering; or, The Gipsey's Prophecy (1816). Annika Bautz.
“Handing Over Walter Scott? The Writer's Hand on the English and French Marketplace.” Céline Sabiron.
Section 2
“Vanishing Mediators and Modes of Existence in Walter Scott's The Monastery.” Evan Gottlieb.
“‘In Contrast to Those Whom We Have Called Materialists, Mr. [Scott] Is Spiritual’: On Scott and Woolf, Romance and ‘Fullness of Life.’” Matthew Wickman.
“The Politics of Fear: Gothic Histories, the English Civil War and Walter Scott's Woodstock.” Fiona Price.
Section 3
“Towards the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry.” Alison Lumsden.
“‘Land Debateable’: The Supernatural in Scott's Narrative Poetry.” Ainsley McIntosh.
“The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Improvisatory Authorship.” Daniel Cook.
Section 4
“Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary and the Ossian Controversy.” Nigel Leask.
“‘This Right of Mercy’: The Royal Pardon in The Heart of Midlothian.” Tara Ghoshal Wallace.
“Sir Walter Scott and the Caribbean: Unravelling the Silences.” Carla Sassi.
Section 5
“‘All That Is Curious on Continent and Isle’: Time, Place, and Modernity in Scott's ‘Vacation 1814’ and The Pirate.” Penny Fielding.
“Scott, India and Australia.” Graham Tulloch.
“Trees, Rivers, and Stories: Walter Scott Writing the Land.” Susan Oliver.
Please contact author (Susan Oliver) for more information.
shape the ways in which magazines in North America and Britain represented the natural environment? To what extent did periodicals contribute to the growth of armchair tourism and a public desire to encounter, through reading, a world beyond urban and metropolitan lifestyles? What difference did newspapers and magazines make to
the way people thought about the natural world? This chapter investigates the emergence during the long nineteenth century of a culture of environmental journalism, paying attention to different kinds of writing that reflected progressive debates about botany, wilderness, land-use change and aesthetics. The focus is on the development of a transatlantic environmental imaginary not constrained by (although it may have
acknowledged or assented to the growth of) national interests. Then, as now, environmental journalism was far from being a unifi ed genre. Rather, it comprised a more or less thematically connected set of writings that operated across a range of different kinds of publication. Newspapers, magazines, special interest and professional journals, some with extravagant illustrations and others with little or no graphic content,
provided a multimedial network through which ideas about natural science, domestic landscapes, pastoralism and wilderness were shared and discussed.
economic structure and ecology of Scotland. This article explores Scott's attention to the rise of a modern forestry industry in Scotland that took place as part of a wider growth in British imports of trees (live and as timber) from Canada.
The English Illustrated Magazine was a late Victorian periodical that published fiction and poetry from contributors including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Walter Swinburne. Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Walter Crane were amongst its illustrators (Crane also contributed poetry). Art and theatre critic, writer, and pre-Raphaelite advocate Joseph Comyns Carr was editor from 1883 until 1889. The characteristic of the magazine therefore encouraged readers to think imaginatively about the content, within a framework of mystery, fantasy, and an idealised approach to beauty.
The curiosity with which readers of British and North American magazines regarded writing about Morocco, and other North African countries, is documented through the many articles and accompanying illustrations. Those accounts usually portray Morocco as a contentious but at the same time desirable marginal zone where a familiar Europe confronts alterity in Africa or the Maghreb. Another more complex matter is the extent to which the Morocco described in the textual space of magazines functioned as a viable place of transculturation, or a contact zone in which the subject asserted a degree of autonomy. Such autonomy was limited, not least because the language and literary techniques used in the press repeatedly inscribed a colonialist agenda. Travel writer, novelist, poet and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich ironically repudiated those conventions at the beginning of his article about Morocco in the New York based Harper’s Magazine in 1881. Whilst complaining he was “tired of African travelers. One always knows beforehand what they have in their pack,” Aldrich begins with a counterintuitive perspective, in which Morocco provides the means to critically confront other writing about Africa. This essay explores the extent to which magazine articles about Morocco, in the years preceding National Geographic, challenged or retuned to the modes of viewing North Africa from which authors so often expressed a desire to escape.
the walker of the streets. In recent years, and in line with a resurgence of
theoretical and historical interest in walking in cities, scholars including Felicity
James and Simon Hull have explored Lamb‘s importance as a successor to
eighteenth-century English magazine writers such as Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele, and as a forerunner of the mid-century continental flâneur. The matter of where to take studies of the 'Elia‘ essays following recent attention raises the question of Lamb‘s place in the relationship between British and North American writing. This article shows how, as writers about cities, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson took up the idea of the roving reporter that Lamb - along with William Hazlitt - began in London.
Susan thanks the American Philosophical Society and British Academy for supporting research used in her lecture.
From the medieval greenwood to plantation forestry, nineteenth-century poetry and fiction is filled with references to trees. Susan Oliver looks at ecological crisis and the complex relationship between people and woods as trees were replaced by grass in a rapidly changing world.