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.

1. Introduction. Robert Burns: Poet and Texts in Life and Afterlife, Gerard Carruthers
Part I - Texts
2. The Imprint of His Origin: Robert Burns, John Wilson, and the Print Culture of Late Eighteenth-Century Ayrshire, Patrick Scott
3. 'My Heart's in the Highlands': Poetry, Politics, and Patronage in Robert Burns's Highland Tour, Nigel Leask
4. The Scots Musical Museum, Murray Pittock
5. 'For the honour of Caledonia': Burns's Songs for George Thomson, Kirsteen McCue
6. The Pragmatics of Punctuation in the Letters of Robert Burns, Jeremy J. Smith
7. Robert Burns and the Devil: 'Halloween', John Burnett
8. 'I, Rob, am here': Becoming and Belonging in the Verse Epistles, Gerard Lee McKeever
9. The Kirk Satires and Kirk Politics, Ronnie Young
10. Burns and Bawdry, Pauline Mackay
11. 'Tam o' Shanter' - Storytelling and Antiquarianism, Robert P. Irvine
12. The Politics of Robert Burns from the 1780s to the 1790s, Gerard Carruthers and Kevin Thomas Gallagher
13. Writing to and about Women, Moira Hansen
14. Robert Burns and Book Illustration, Sandro Jung
Part II - Cultural and Intellectual Contexts
15. Burns and the Natural World, Fiona Stafford
16. Anti-Calvinism and the Ayrshire Enlightenment, Colin Kidd
17. Robert Burns, Club Society, and Convivial Sociability, Corey E. Andrews
Part III - The Burns Industry
18. Birth of a Collection: Burns Monument Trust and the formation of Scotland's first literary museum (1814-1900), David Hopes
19. The Architectural Monument to Robert Burns in the New Age of Identity Politics and Nationalism, Johnny Rodger
20. Sights of Memory: Robert Burns and Romantic-era Book Illustration, Leith Davis
21. Robert Burns and the Visual Arts: Portraiture, National Landscapes, and the Context of Monuments, Murdo Macdonald
22. Robert Burns and the Cultural Politics of Food, Caroline McCracken-Flesher
23. Bard Behaviour: Imitating, Mistaking, and Faking Burns, Gerard Carruthers and George Smith
24. Afterburn(s): Scholarly and Fictional Receptions, Brean Hammond
Part IV - Burns's British Afterlives
25. 'At the Grave of Burns': Robert Burns and British Romanticism after 1800, Alex Deans
26. Why the English had to invent Robert Burns, Jon Mee
27. Parallel Universes: Burns and Gaelic, Ronald Black
28. 'No new note?': Burns and the Victorian Working-Class Poet, Kirstie Blair
29. 'We'll ne'er forget the people': Burns and Politics, 1796-1945, Catriona M. M. Macdonald and Christopher A. Whatley
Part V - International Writer
30. Robert Burns and Ireland, Jennifer Orr
31. Dear Guest and Ghost: Celebrating Robert Burns convivially and globally since 1801, Clark McGinn
32. Burns Among the American Abolitionists, Thomas Keith
33. The View from the Octagon: Robert Burns in New Zealand, Liam McIlvanney
34. Robert Burns and Twentieth-Century War, David Goldie
35. Iconic Burns: A Shape Shifting 'Sign' of the Times, Josephine Dougal
36. Burns on Screen: A Critical History of Cinematic Representations of the Life of the Bard, John Ritchie
37. Burns in The Digital Age, Craig Lamont
38. Robert Burns and the Inhuman, Matthew Wickman
Part VI - Burns Biography
39. Burns Biography, 1786-1800, Rhona Brown
40. Burns Biography, 1808-1939, Carol Baraniuk & Gerard Carruthers
41. Burns Biography, 1949-2019, Carol Baraniuk
42. Further Resources, Kevin Thomas Gallagher