At 250, Walter Scott points toward our possible futures. Scott, although we necessarily look on his times as past, of course experienced them as present. His times were times of crisis. Scott, then, has much to share in the experience, narration, anticipation and response to change as a condition of life - a condition our era, with its existential challenges to climate, to public health, to civilization knows only too well. In Scott at 250, major scholars foreground the author as theorist of tomorrow - as the surveyor of the complexities of the present who also gazes, as we do, toward an anxious and hopeful future.

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.

Scott's Books is an approachable introduction to the Waverley Novels. Drawing on substantial research in Scott's intertextual sources, it offers a fresh approach to the existing readings where the thematic and theoretical are the norm. Avoiding jargon, and moving briskly, it tackles the vexed question of Scott's 'circumbendibus' style head on, suggesting that it is actually one of the most exciting aspects of his fiction: indeed, what Ian Duncan has called the 'elaborately literary narrative', at first sight a barrier, is in a sense what the novels are primarily 'about'. The book aims to show how inventive, witty, and entertaining Scott's richly allusive style is; how he keeps his varied readership on board with his own inexhaustible variety; and how he allows proponents of a wide range of positions to have their say, using a detached, ironic, but never cynical narrative voice to undermine the more rigid and inhumane rhetoric. The Introduction outlines this approach and sets the book in the context of earlier and current Scott criticism. It also deals with some practical issues, including forms of reference and the distinctive use of the term 'Authorial'. The four chapters are designed to zoom in progressively from the general to the particular. 'Resources' explores the printed material available to Scott in his library and gives an overview of the way he uses it in his fiction. 'Style' confronts objections to the 'circumbendibus' Scott and shows how his Ciceronian style with its penchant for polysyllables enables him to embrace a wide range of rhetoric relayed in a detached but not cynical Authorial voice. 'Strategies' explores how he keeps his very wide audience on board by a complex bonding between characters, readers, and Author, and stresses the extraordinary variety of exuberant inventiveness with which he handles intertextual allusions. 'Mottoes' examines the most remarkable of Scott's intertextual devices, the chapter epigraphs, bringing into play the approaches developed in the previous chapters. The brief concluding 'Envoi' moves out again to the widest possible perspective, suggesting how readers should now be able to move on to, or return to, the novels and the critical conversation, with an appreciation of the central importance of the ludic for an appreciation of Scott in a world once again threatened by inhumane and humorless rigidities.

• The first evaluation for many years of Scott as a traveller, and the first ever single treatment of all his Continental travels • Detailed discussion of his late-in-life venture to the Mediterranean in 1831-1832, drawing on fresh source material and re-evaluating evidence for his time in Naples and Rome in a new light • Deals as much with those trips dreamed of and planned – but not accomplished – as with those actually achieved: projected journeys to Spain and Portugal, Germany and Switzerland • Profusely illustrated with some unpublished colour and mono photographs from the author’s and other private collections Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote frequently of his desire to travel widely in Europe. He made, however, only three Continental ventures. Two were to Belgium and Paris. Shortly before his death, he at last journeyed to the Mediterranean. His time in Naples and Rome provoked both interest and sadness: most of all, it caused him to reflect on the Scotland of his mind and heart. These trips are full of interest – but so are the many other schemes Scott entertained for wider travelling, notably to Spain and Portugal, Switzerland and Germany. In Frolics in the Face of Europe: Sir Walter Scott, Continental Travel and the Tradition of the Grand Tour, all are examined in the context of the Grand Tour tradition, and in the new kind of ‘romantic’ travel that, after 1815, came to replace it. By drawing on Scott’s letters and journal, on his verse, prose fiction and the literature of travel, which gave him such a wide knowledge of the world without even leaving his library at Abbotsford, many social, literary and artistic connections are made. Events, places and personalities are linked, often in surprising ways. This book offers a fresh view of Scott as the 250th anniversary of his birth approaches.

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.