130 Years
"The Sinuosities of the Ground": Sir Walter Scott, Borders, Fiction, and Landscape
On Thursday 14th October 2021 we had a joint-lecture with the Edinburgh University English Department given by Dr David Stewart. He was introduced by our chairman Prof. Iain Torrance.
Dr David Stewart is Associate Professor of English Literature at Northumbria University. He is the author of Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (2011) and The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt (2018), and co-editor with John Gardner of Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s (2024), as well as various shorter pieces on writers including James Hogg, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth.
Synopsis: This talk celebrates the pleasures of getting lost in Scott’s novels. Scott’s celebration of the land of the Anglo-Scottish Border region is well known. Less appreciated is how dizzyingly strange many of Scott’s encounters with that landscape are. The talk considers how Scott explores the border region via a landscape that he sees as curiously mobile. In doing so Dr Stewart asks us to rethink three terms central to Scott’s achievement: borders, landscape, and fiction.
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