Robert Mayer presents a study of correspondences between Walter Scott and socially and culturally diverse readers of his work in the English-speaking world in the early nineteenth century. He explores Scott's original constructions of authorship, reading strategies, and versions of fame in these revealing letters.

This is a comprehensive collection devoted to the work of Sir Walter Scott, drawing on the innovative research and scholarship which have revitalised the study of the whole range of his exceptionally diverse writing in recent years.

No writer has ever been as famous as Sir Walter Scott once was; and no writer has ever enjoyed such huge acclaim followed by such absolute neglect and outright hostility. But Scotland would not be Scotland except for Scott. All the icons of Scottishness have their roots in Scott's novels, poems, public events and histories. It's a legacy both inspiring and constraining, and just one of the ironies that fuse Scott and Scotland into Scott-land. In this book Stuart Kelly reveals Scott the paradox: the celebrity unknown, the nationalist unionist, the aristocrat loved by communists, the forward-looking reactionary. Part literary study, part biography, part travelogue, part surreptitious autobiography, Scott-land unveils a complex, contradictory man and the complex contradictory country he created. Insightful, accessible, witty and melancholy, this is a 'voyage around my fatherland' like no other.