An Ecological Study Of Sir Walter Scott's Scottish Historical Novels

It is as a British litterateur that Walter Scott goes down in history, but to be more specific, he is a writer of Scottish origin. In his novels which have as their themes the Scottish history and folk legend are vividly represented the plain social conventions of the Highland residents not totally involved in the Industrial Revolution. Among all the historical novels by Scott, the Scottish novels are most successful, thus exerting a far-reaching influence on posterity, hence the status of Scott as "Father of European Historical Novels".The present paper focuses on Scott's three Scottish novels and the comprehension of these three texts leads to the discovery that, while representing the social traditions in Highland before the collapse of its patriarchal clan system, Scott is actually constructing a beautiful world in which man coexists in harmony with nature. Therefore, taking the human-nature relationship as a dividing point and adopting such methods as close reading, ecocriticism, eco-feminist criticism and cultural research, the present paper is meant to find out what Scott's Ecological thinking is and how it takes shape.This article is composed of three parts, namely, introduction, main body and conclusion and the whole text is commanded by the following aspects:the raising of the issue, the research statuesque, the definition of relevant concepts, the research methods and the innovation of this paper. The main body falls into three chapters, the first one concerning several natural images in Scott's Scottish novels and analyzing the human-nature relationship as reflected by such images, the second one discussing the resistance and criticism of industrial civilization as revealed in Scottish novels by analyzing the relationship between these three types of figures, that is, "Son of Nature", "Man seeking roots" and "The Alienated". Chapter Three on the basis of the previous two chapters, serving to be a summary of Scott's Ecological thinking and to explain the origin of such thoughts according to the then social cultural backgrounds and Scott's personal experiences. The part of conclusion analyzes the unity between the genre of historical novels and ecological themes, explicates why Scott chooses Scottish novels to construct his eco-ideals and discusses what the values are in constructing such ideals.In the present-day world where the ecological problems are becoming more and more serious, the closing reading of these three fictions and the theory of modern ecological criticism endow Scott's Scottish novels with a fresh interpretation, whose significance is self-evident.