Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland
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Abstract
This book is a reassessment of the writings of Robert Burns (1759–96), arguably the most original poet writing in Great Britain between Pope and Blake, and creator of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry. Although still celebrated as Scotland's national poet, Burns has long been marginalised in English literary studies worldwide, due to a mistaken view that his poetry is linguistically incomprehensible and of interest to Scottish readers only. This book challenges this view by interpreting Burns's poetry as an innovative and critical engagement with the experience of rural modernity, namely to the revolutionary transformation of Scottish agriculture and society in the decades between 1760 and 1800, thereby resituating it within the mainstream of the Scottish and European enlightenments. Detailed study of the literary, social, and historical contexts of Burns's poetry explodes the myth of the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’, revealing his poetic artfulness and critical acumen as a social observer, as well as his significance as a Romantic precursor. The book discusses Burns's radical decision to write ‘Scots pastoral’ (rather than English georgic) poetry in the tradition of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, focusing on themes of Scottish and British identity, agricultural improvement, poetic self-fashioning, language, politics, religion, patronage, poverty, antiquarianism, and the animal world. The book offers interpretations of all Burns's major poems and some of the songs, the first to do so since Thomas Crawford's landmark study of 1960. It concludes with a new assessment of his importance for British Romanticism and to a ‘Four Nations’ understanding of Scottish literature and culture.
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Front Matter
- Introduction: The ‘Heaven‐Taught Ploughman’
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1
Robert Burns and the ‘New Husbandry’
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2
Scots Pastoral
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3
The Making of a Poet
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4
Pastoral Politics
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5
Beasties
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6
Hellfire and Common Sense
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7
The Annals of the Poor
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8
The Deil and the Exciseman
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9
Across the Shadow Line: Robert Burns and British Romanticism
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End Matter
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