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The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns

Online ISBN:
9780191995590
Print ISBN:
9780198846246
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns

Gerard Carruthers (ed.)
Gerard Carruthers
(ed.)
Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow
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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).

Published online:
22 February 2024
Published in print:
1 February 2024
Online ISBN:
9780191995590
Print ISBN:
9780198846246
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

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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