"The G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns includes fourteen color and fifty-eight black-and-white illustrations as well as an introduction by G. Ross Roy on the history of the collection. In text and images, the catalogue documents a monumental research collection that serves as an open invitation for further investigations into the life, works, and legacy of Scotland's bard."--BOOK JACKET.

Designed for the independent traveller to Scotland, this guide covers all the popular places of interest, events and attractions, together with a factfile providing essential travel information. It offers advice on means of travel, route details, accommodation, eating out and sporting activities.

This revised edition lists approximately 1200 libraries in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, some included for the first time, with details of their rare and special book collections. It covers mainly those printed before 1850, but includes manuscript and modern material where related.

The Merry Muses of Caledonia is among Burns' best known, but least read, work. This collection of bawdy poems, some written by and some collected by Burns, ranges from celebrations of spirited women in "Ellibanks", to misogyny in "There was twa wives" and male fantasy in "Nine Inch will please a lady". These engaging poems are not lewd or distasteful but possess a great wit and charm. This new edition updates the 1959 printing, which with engaging accompanying material by James Barke and preface by J. De Lancey Ferguson have made this the definitive version, until now. "The Merry Muses" was always intended to be accompanied by music but the 1959 edition was left incomplete due to Barke's premature death. For the first time the book is completed as it was always meant to be with notes to the tunes created with reference to Barke's unpublished papers. "The Luath Merry Muses" edition also includes bonus material with specially commissioned illustrations from top political satirist Bob Dewar and an introduction by Burns scholar Valentina Bold. Ferguson's work is brought up to date with commentary on the latest critical responses. This new edition will make this classic of Burns' literature more accessible to modern readers.

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.

In 1832 the Scottish ballad collector Peter Buchan of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, presented an anthology of risqué‚ and convivial songs and ballads to a Highland laird. When Professor Francis James Child of Harvard was preparing his magisterial edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, he made inquiries about it, but it was not made available in time to be considered for his work. On his death it was presented to the Child Memorial Library at Harvard. Because of its unseemly materials, the manuscript languished there since, unprinted, though referred to now and again, and a few items from time to time made an appearance. The manuscript has now been transcribed with full annotation and with an introduction on the compiler, his times, and the Scottish bawdy tradition. It contains the texts (without tunes) of seventy-six bawdy songs and ballads, along with a long-lost scatological poem attributed to the Edinburgh writer James “Balloon” Tytler. Appendices give details of Buchan's two published collections of ballads. Additionally, there is a list of tale types and motifs, a glossary of Scots and archaic words, a bibliography, and an index. The High-Kilted Muse brings to light a long-suppressed volume and fills in a great gap in published bawdy songs and ballads.