The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns

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.

Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the ongoing Oxford University Press edition of the collected works of Robert Burns, and is author or editor of 24 books and over 170 academic essays. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a board member of the Ellisland Robert Burns Trust, an Honorary Advisor to the National Trust for Scotland and serves on the Joint Advisory Committee with oversight of Walter Scott’s Library at Abbotsford. He is also a Trustee of the Scottish Catholic Heritage Collections Trust.