The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns
The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns
Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow and general editor of the ongoing multivolume edition of the collected works of Robert Burns, for which he is co-editing Correspondence (three volumes) and editing Poetry (two volumes). Recent publications as editor include The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Scottish Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); and, as co-editor, Performing Robert Burns: Enactments and Representation of the National Bard (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford University Press, 2018).
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Abstract
The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns treats the extensive writing of and culture surrounding Scotland’s national bard. Robert Burns (1759–96) was a producer of lyrical verse and satirical poetry in English and Scots; a songwriter and song collector; and a writer of bawdry, journals, commonplace books, and correspondence. Burns sculpted his own image, his untutored rusticity as much a sincere persona as it was not entirely accurate. He was an antiquarian, a national patriot, a pioneer of what today we would call ‘folk culture’, and a man of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This handbook considers Burns’s reception in his own time and beyond, extending to his iconic status as a world writer. Burns was important to the English Romantic poets in the context of debates about abolition in the United States. In the Victorian era he was widely utilized as a model for different kinds of popular poetry, and he has been utilized as a contestant in debates surrounding Scottish—indeed, British—politics in peacetime and in wartime down to the present day. The writer’s afterlife includes not only a large number of biographies but a whole culture of commemoration in art, architecture, fiction, material culture, museum exhibition, and even forged manuscripts and memorabilia, as well as appearances, apparently, via spiritualist seances. The politics of his work channel the fierce debates of late-eighteenth-century Scottish ecclesiastical controversy as well as the ages of the American, Agricultural, and French revolutions. All of this ground is traversed in this handbook, the largest critical compendium ever assembled about Robert Burns.
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Front Matter
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1
Introduction—Robert Burns: Poet and Texts in Life and Afterlife
Gerard Carruthers
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Part I Texts
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2
The Imprint of His Origin: Robert Burns, John Wilson, and the Print Culture of Late Eighteenth-Century Ayrshire
Patrick Scott
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3
‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’: Poetry, Politics, and Patronage in Robert Burns’s Highland Tour
Nigel Leask
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4
The Scots Musical Museum
Murray Pittock
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5
‘For the honour of Caledonia’: Burns’s Songs for George Thomson
Kirsteen McCue
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6
The Pragmatics of Punctuation in the Letters of Robert Burns
Jeremy J. Smith
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7
Robert Burns and the Devil: ‘Halloween’
John Burnett
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8
‘I, Rob, am here’: Becoming and Belonging in the Verse Epistles
Gerard Lee McKeever
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9
The Kirk Satires and Kirk Politics
Ronnie Young
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10
Burns and Bawdry
Pauline Mackay
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11
‘Tam o’ Shanter’: Storytelling and Antiquarianism
Robert P. Irvine
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12
The Politics of Robert Burns from the 1780s to the 1790s
Gerard Carruthers andKevin Thomas Gallagher
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13
Writing To and About Women
Moira Hansen
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14
Robert Burns and Book Illustration
Sandro Jung
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2
The Imprint of His Origin: Robert Burns, John Wilson, and the Print Culture of Late Eighteenth-Century Ayrshire
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Part II Cultural and Intellectual Contexts
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Part III The Burns Industry
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18
Birth of a Collection: Burns Monument Trust and the Formation of Scotland’s First Literary Museum (1814–1900)
David Hopes
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19
The Architectural Monument to Robert Burns in the New Age of Identity Politics and Nationalism
Johnny Rodger
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20
Sights of Memory: Robert Burns and Romantic-Era Book Illustration
Leith Davis
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21
Robert Burns and the Visual Arts: Portraiture, National Landscapes, and the Context of Monuments
Murdo Macdonald
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22
Robert Burns and the Cultural Politics of Food
Caroline McCracken-Flesher
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23
Bard Behaviour: Imitating, Mistaking, and Faking Burns
Gerard Carruthers andGeorge Smith
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24
Afterburn(s): Scholarly and Fictional Receptions
Brean Hammond
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18
Birth of a Collection: Burns Monument Trust and the Formation of Scotland’s First Literary Museum (1814–1900)
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Part IV Burns’s British Afterlives
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25
‘At the Grave of Burns’: Robert Burns and British Romanticism after 1800
Alex Deans
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26
Why the English Had to Invent Robert Burns
Jon Mee
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27
Parallel Universes: Burns and Gaelic
Ronald Black
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28
‘No new note?’: Burns and the Victorian Working-Class Poet
Kirstie Blair
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29
‘We’ll ne’er forget the people’: Burns and Politics, 1796–1945
Catriona M. M. Macdonald andChristopher A. Whatley
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25
‘At the Grave of Burns’: Robert Burns and British Romanticism after 1800
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Part V International Writer
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30
Robert Burns and Ireland
Jennifer Orr
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31
Dear Guest and Ghost: Celebrating Robert Burns Convivially and Globally Since 1801
Clark McGinn
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32
Robert Burns and Frederick Douglass
Thomas Keith
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33
The View from the Octagon: Robert Burns in New Zealand
Liam McIlvanney
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34
Robert Burns and Twentieth-Century War
David Goldie
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35
Iconic Burns: A Shape Shifting ‘Sign’ of the Times
Josephine Dougal
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36
Burns on Screen: A Critical History of Cinematic Representations of the Life of the Bard
John Ritchie
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37
Burns in the Digital Age
Craig Lamont
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38
Robert Burns and the Inhuman
Matthew Wickman
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30
Robert Burns and Ireland
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Part VI Burns Biography
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Part VII Further Resources
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End Matter
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