‘The Voice of the People’ presents a series of essays on literary aspects of the European folk revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and focuses on two key practices of antiquarianism: the role that collecting and editing played in the formation of ethnological study in the European academy; and the business of publishing and editing, which produced many ‘folkloric’ texts of dubious authenticity. The volume also presents new readings of various genres, including the epic, song, tale and novel, and contributes to the study of several crucial European literary figures. Above all, it investigates the great anonymous authors of the European folk tradition – in narrative and lyric art – and their relation to the cultural movements and imagined identities of the peoples of the emerging nineteenth-century European nation.

This volume reassesses working-class poetry and poetics in Victorian Britain, using Scotland as a focus and with particular attention to the role of the popular press in fostering and disseminating working-class verse cultures. It studies a very wide variety of writers who are unknown to scholarship, and assesses the political, social, and cultural work which their poetry performed. During the Victorian period, Scotland underwent unprecedented changes in terms of industrialization, the rise of the city, migration, and emigration. This study shows how poets who defined themselves as part of a specifically Scottish tradition responded to these changes. It substantially revises our understanding of Scottish literature in this period, while contributing to wider investigations of the role of popular verse in national and international cultures.