The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns

Edited by Gerard Carruthers

Paper, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3649-5
$32.50

September, 2009
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3648-8
Edinburgh University Press
$95.00

Gerard Carruthers provides both a comprehensive introduction to and contemporary critical contexts for the study of Robert Burns. Detailed commentary on the artistry of Burns is complemented by works on the cultural reception and afterlife of this most iconic of world writers. Contributors examine the biographical legacy of Burns and his relationship with Scottish, Romantic, and International cultures. Burns's engagements with ecology, gender, the pastoral, politics, pornography, slavery, and song-culture are also analyzed, including an extensive treatment of his publishing history, especially Burns's place in popular, bourgeois, and Enlightenment societies. This volume forms the most modern collection of critical responses to Burns, which, more than ever, recasts Burns as a "mainstream" man of the Enlightenment and Romantic period, explaining his enduring and sometimes controversial fascination for more than two hundred years.

Related Subjects

• European and British Literature
• Scottish Studies

Series

• Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature

About the Author

Gerard Carruthers is reader and Head of Department in Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow. He is general editor of a forthcoming, multivolume edition of the works of Robert Burns and is director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. He is also the author of Robert Burns, editor of The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie, Burns: Poems, and coeditor of Beyond Scotland: New International Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, Walter Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, and English Romanticism and the Celtic World.

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