Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture

Addressing a significant gap in Burns studies, this collection focuses on the reception and representation of Robert Burns in the Americas. While scholarship has quite rightly paid attention to Burns as a representative figure of Scottish national identity, Burns's important role in the cultures of other nations has been under-explored. And yet, Burns's unique status as a poet and songwriter whose international portability and malleability are unsurpassed has resulted in the production of radically diverse material-oral, textual, musical, ceremonial, and architectural-throughout the Americas. Ambitious in its scope, the volume is divided into six sections that take up the following broad topics: transatlantic concerns in Burns's work, Burns's early publication in North America, Burns's reception in the Americas, Scottish emigrants and the creation of Burns's reputation, Burns's extra-literary transatlantic legacy, and Burns today. In shifting the academic focus on Burns from a national to a global perspective, the editors and contributors show how universal themes in Burns's work, such as loss, liberty, and nostalgia, are reinvigorated in innovative and generative ways in the emergent cultures of the Americas.