Multifarious Perspectives of Robert Burns’ Poetry (original) (raw)
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ROBERT BURNS AND FRIENDS essays by W. Ormiston Roy Fellows presented to G. Ross Roy
2012
and friend and mentor to successive generations of Burnsians and Burns scholars. For more than fifty years, Ross Roy has been one of the most active and respected scholars in Scottish literary studies, both for his own research on Burns and other writers, and for the pioneering and influential journal he founded and edited, Studies in Scottish Literature. Arguably it is that journal, as much as any other factor, that first brought the scholarly study of Scottish literature its now-established academic credibility and recognition. The volume departs from the conventions of the festschrift in several ways: its contributors are neither the honoree's distinguished contemporaries nor his former students, the topics of the essays in no way represent the full range of the honoree's scholarly research and interests, and the volume champions no single methodology or perspective. In planning the volume, we were aware that many of the contributions to the splendid double-volume of Studies in Scottish Literature (2008) with which Dr. Roy concluded his editorship had already preempted a festschrift on traditional lines. Instead, this volume focuses on a single author and theme (broadly interpreted, it is true), and the contributors represent a special subset of the many scholars who would wish to honour Ross Roy. The central thread through Dr. Roy's own work has been Robert Burns, and the volume's title also celebrates his own gift for friendship. The participants are scholars from both sides of the Atlantic who have visited the University of South Carolina as W. Ormiston Roy Fellows to conduct research in the G. Ross Collection of Robert Burns & Scottish Poetry. Their essays explore aspects of Burns's relationships with his poetic predecessors and the cultural community of his youth, with his contemporaries, and with correspondents; his songs and song-editing; and his remarkable and very personal impact on subsequent generations. Three essays, still Burns-related, tie in with other threads in Ross Roy's career: his interest in the literature of his native Canada, in literary translation, and in book collecting. Beginning with a biographical tribute to Ross Roy by one editor, the volume concludes with a checklist of Ross Roy's published work by the other. Thanks are due in the first instance to the contributors. Patrick Scott owes thanks to Tom McNally, Dean of Libraries at the University of South Carolina, and to his colleagues in Rare Books, for freeing time to work on the volume, and to the South Carolina Honors College for supporting Justin Mellette's and Mark Taylor's assistance with this and other Burns projects. Ken Simpson acknowledges with gratitude the help of Ronnie Young and David Simpson with some technical issues. Thanks are also due to the good friends who funded publication of the volume through a donation to the Library Fund. The frontispiece portrait has been kindly shared by the University of Glasgow. But above all, the volume owes its existence to the respect and affection, reflected in the dedication, that so many of us have for Ross Roy and Lucie Roy, true friends.
« Robert Burns : le barde, la souris et la pâquerette ».
Le poète Burns manifeste dans ses poèmes une connaissance encyclopédique de la nature, de la flore comme de la faune. S’il est possible d’attribuer cette connaissance à sa pratique empirique de paysan, en réalité, Burns complétait ce savoir au moyen de différents ouvrages offerts ou empruntés, et ce sont des centaines de références et d’allusions aux mondes végétal et animal qui parsèment son œuvre poétique. À l’horizon de l’univers humain, et dans la lignée de la polémique rousseauiste, Burns attire l’attention de ses lecteurs sur l’univers du vivant, subvertissant les limites de l’anthroposphère. Le poète écossais déploie dans ses poèmes une conscience écologique très aiguë qui prend parfois des accents revendicatifs extrêmement virulents. Cette double perspective du poète et du paysan envers la nature fait de Burns un objet d’étude particulièrement fascinant dans le cadre d’une perspective éco-critique. Dépassant l’horizon anthropocentriste de nombre de ses contemporains, Burns insiste à sa manière sur la nécessité d’un écocentrisme permettant aux règnes humain, végétal et animal de vivre ensemble de façon durable.
The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology, and Identity by Alex Broadhead
The Bottle Imp, 2015
Burns: Style, Ideology, and Identity is the first book-length study of Burns's language use, a topic that is much deserving of extended critical scrutiny. While several critics have analyzed this issue, few have applied an intensive linguistic methodology in order to assess and interpret Burns's poetic motives and strategies. Broadhead observes that 'the nuances of Burns's language demand that we make use of the most precise tools currently available' (x), adding that 'twenty-first-century sociolinguistic theory is uniquely situated to help readers of Burns to develop a heightened appreciation of the creative dimensions of his approach to language' (p. ix). Applying such sociolinguistic tools throughout the book, Broadhead enables readers to better understand the depth and complexity of Burns's language use in his poems and prose, which 'are deeply marked by the linguistic concerns that preoccupied his peers' (1). This aspect of Burns's writings has often been misunderstood, especially by those who have traditionally sought to establish his seminal role in the eighteenthcentury 'Scots vernacular revival'. Instead of envisioning Burns as the last great Scots poet defying forces of English cultural assimilation, Broadhead presents us with a poet experimenting with language and deploying it in often unexpected ways; indeed, he suggests that 'Burns's poems sowed the seeds of a future imaginative reconceptualization of Scots' (72). Focusing on this transformative element of Burns's writing allows Broadhead to both situate and distinguish the
Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 2012
Pp. ix + 230. The year 2009 saw the publication of several critical assessments of Robert Bums, as well as a new biography. The immediate reason for the spate of new material was the 250 th anniversary of the poet's death, an event endorsed by the Scottish government and described as the Year of the Homecoming. As Murray Pittock notes in his Introduction to Robert Burns in Global Culture, "the 250 th anniversary of Robert Bums's birth was a key literary moment, not unlike the anniversaries of Shakespeare in 1964 or Scott in 1871" (p. 13). In the years following this epochal event for Burns studies, critical interest in the poet remains high and discussion lively, with much attention paid to Bums's relationships with the pastoral, Ireland, and Romanticism, his complex reception history in the academy and popular culture, and his formal influence upon later poets. Robert Burns in Global Culture and Burns and Other Poets continue the important work begun in these critical areas, as well as explore new ground. Of particular significance is the analysis of Burns as a figure of global dimensions, reaching audiences far beyond Scotland. Reflecting on the international celebration of the poet in 2009, Pittock remarks that "Burns was well on his way back to being a global hero rather than the local icon into which he had begun to decay" (p. 13). Indeed, Pittock rightly claims that "the study of Bums and his poetry is entering a new era" (p. 23). Pittock's collection furthers the research initiated by other recent Scottish Studies volumes like Fickle
'Far-fam'd RAB': Scottish Labouring-Class Poets Writing in the Shadow of Robert Burns, 1785-1792
This essay appears courtesy of Studies in Hogg and His World. All rights reserved.
This essay presents a detailed analysis of the works of three labouring-class poets who wrote in the "shadow" of Robert Burns: John Lapraik, David Sillar, and Janet Little. It assesses the influence of Burns upon their literary productions , finding that the "shadow" of Burns tended to diminish the works and reputations of his fellow labouring-class poets during this period.
The Genius of Scotland: Robert Burns and His Critics, 1796-1828.
This article focuses on the critical reception of Robert Burns from 1796 to 1828. It explores how the concept of genius influenced the perception of Burns as it was represented by critics and editors throughout the time period. Testimony of Burns’s ‘genius’ in the early nineteenth century was entirely in line with critical responses to the poet’s works beginning in 1786. This essay provides a survey of these responses, revealing a consistent pattern of critical reception of Burns and his body of work. The primary critical approach to Burns’s work involved the application of ‘genius’ theory; the continuum of critical responses demonstrates the fluid nature of this concept throughout the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries. However, attention to the poet’s reception history also shows that while the concept underwent significant moderation as an aesthetic category, its association with moral failings was almost uniformly expressed by Burns’s critics. The ties between genius and biography, particularly in Burns’s case, became increasingly knotted as later commentators attempted to understand the poet’s life and works. This essay demonstrates that the process of myth-building and moralizing surrounding Burns continued unabated through the nineteenth century, particularly as critics assayed the poet’s nationalist iconicity while attempting to diminish the relevance of moral failings wrought by his ‘genius’. Burns’s fame still highlights this tension between his undeniable poetic gifts and his messy personal life, between his poetic aspirations and his complicated desires.
Whitman on Robert Burns: An Early Essay Recovered
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 1996
THE AMERICAN POET, has published in an American newspaper his estimate of the poet Bums," W. M. Rossetti reported in the London Academy in late February 1875. 1 Remarkably, Whitman's early critical essay on Bums has hitherto been lost to scholarship. It was first printed in the January 25, 1875, issue of an ephemeral paper entitled Our Land and Time-a periodical so obscure it is not catalogued' by the Union List of Serials, the Union List of Newspapers, the National Union Catalogue of pre-1956 imprints, or the OCLC on-line database. Fortunately, it was copied the same day in the New York Daily Graphic, a paper to which the poet sometimes contributed, from which it is here reprinted. Whitman later revised the essay for publication in the New York Critic (December 16, 1882); in the North American Review under the title "Robert Bums as Poet and Person" (November 1886); in November Boughs, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers, and Complete Poems & Prose (all 1888); and finally in Complete Prose Works (1891-92). In lieu of a detailed collation of all versions, I have underlined here the passages omitted from Whitman's subsequent essays on Bums; that is, I highlight the material, totaling several hundred words, new to Whitman scholarship.2