Robert Burns in Global Culture is a collection which breaks new ground in treating Burns' poetry and influence in an international context. Widely recognized as poet of global significance in the nineteenth century, Burns' reputation has suffered from the critical turns in Romanticism since 1945 and is only now beginning to be seen in its proper context. Following on from the celebrations across the world to mark Burns' 250th anniversary in 2009, this collection asks questions concerning the nature of Burns' global influence in the United States, Europe and the Commonwealth, examines the extraordinary ways in which his writing combines a distinctively progressive agenda with deceptively traditional styles, and emplaces his reputation at the heart of questions of American exceptionalism, European democracy, British imperial identities, Italian politics, French literary history, questions of desire and sexuality, the Burns Supper and the extraordinary cult of Burns statues. 'Robert Burns in Global Culture' combines literary criticism, history, cultural theory and comparative literature to create a set of powerful, new and unique directions in the study of this major Romantic poet.

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, satirical poetry, in English and Scots, a song-writer and song-collector, a writer of bawdry, journals, commonplace books and correspondence. Sculpting his own image, his untutored rusticity was a sincere persona as much as it was not entirely accurate. Burns was an antiquarian, national patriot, pioneer of what today we would call 'folk culture', and a man of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The 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 US, in the Victorian era he was widely utilised as a model for different kinds of popular poetry and he has been utilised as a contestant in debates surrounding Scottish and, 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 American, Agrarian and French revolutions. All of this ground is traversed in this Handbook, the largest critical compendium ever assembled about Robert Burns.

Robert Burns is Scotland’s greatest cultural icon. Yet, despite his continued popularity, critical work has been compromised by the myths that have built up around him. McGuirk focuses on Burns’s poems and songs, analysing his use of both vernacular Scots and literary English to provide a unique reading of his work.

Robert Burns (1759 –1796), Scotland's national poet and pioneer of the Romantic Movement, has been hugely influential across Europe and indeed throughout the world. Burns has been translated seven times as often as Byron, with 21 Norwegian translations alone recorded since 1990; he was translated into German before the end of his short life, and was of key importance in the vernacular politics of central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. This collection of essays by leading international scholars and translators traces the cultural impact of Burns' work across Europe and includes bibliographies of major translations of his work in each country covered, as well as a publication history and timeline of his reception on the continent.

This book provides a critical study of the relationship between Robert Burns and the United States of America, c.1786-1866. Though Burns is commonly referred to as Scotland’s “National Poet”, his works were frequently reprinted in New York and Philadelphia; his verse mimicked by an emerging canon of American poets; and his songs appropriated by both abolitionists and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War era. Adopting a transnational, Atlantic Studies perspective that shifts emphasis from Burns as national poet to transnational icon, this book charts the reception, dissemination and cultural memory of Burns and his works in the United States up to 1866.

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage. The book demonstrates the ways in which colonial controversies around prayer, song, hospitality, naming, mapping, architecture, and medicine are drawn out by translators to make connections between Romantic literature, its preoccupations, and debates in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial worlds.

This monograph offers a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between the poetics and practice of Robert Burns and reevaluates the nature of his role in the history of Scots. By drawing on ideas from twenty-first-century sociolinguistic theory, it seeks to transform the debate surrounding Burns’s language. Through a series of readings that explore the way in which Burns used and commented on the styles associated with different places, groups and genres, it demonstrates how languages, places, and the identities associated with both are, in Burns’s writing, subject to continual reinvention. In this respect, the study breaks with existing accounts of the subject, insofar as it presents Scots, English and the other languages used by Burns not as fixed, empirically-observable entities, but as ideas that were revised and remade through the poet’s work. Focusing on Burns’s poems, songs, letters, prefaces, and glossaries, the book pays special attention to the complex ways in which the author engaged with such issues as phonology, grammar, and the naming of languages. The Burns who emerges from this book is not the marginal figure of traditional accounts—an under-educated poet alienated from the philological mainstream—but rather a well-informed thinker who, more than any other contemporary writer, embodies the creative linguistic spirit of the eighteenth century.

An engaging and authoritative history of Scotland’s influence in the world and the world’s on Scotland, from the Thirty Years’ War to the present day Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, yet by some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. Neither a colony of England nor a fully equal partner in the British union, Scotland has often been seen as simply a component part of British history. But the story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance—and global consequence. In this wide-ranging, deeply researched account, Murray Pittock examines the place of Scotland in the world. He explores Scotland and Empire, the rise of nationalism, and the pressures on the country from an increasingly monolithic understanding of “Britishness.” From the Thirty Years’ War to Jacobite risings and today’s ongoing independence debates, Scotland and its diaspora have undergone profound changes. This groundbreaking account reveals the diversity of Scotland’s history and shows how, after the country disappeared from the map as an independent state, it continued to build a global brand.

This volume offers detailed accounts of the cults of individual writers and a comparative perspective on the spread of centenary fever across Europe. It offers a fascinating insight into the interaction between literature and cultural memory, and the entanglement between local, national and European identities at the highpoint of nation-building.

This collection of essays addresses the role of literature in radical politics. Topics covered include the legacy of Robert Burns, broadside literature in Munster and radical literature in Wales.