Walter Scott At 250

Book excerpt: 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.