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