The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns provides both a comprehensive introduction to and the most contemporary critical contexts for the study of Robert Burns. Detailed commentary on the artistry of Burns is complemented by material on the cultural reception and afterlife of this most iconic of world writers. The biographical construction of Burns is examined as are his relations to Scottish, Romantic and International cultures. Burns is also approached in terms of his engagements with Ecology, Gender, Pastoral, Politics, Pornography, Slavery, and Song-culture, and there is extensive coverage of publishing history including Burns's place in popular, bourgeois and Enlightenment cultures during the late eighteenth century. This is the most modern collection of critical responses to Burns from scholars from the United Kingdom and North America, which, more than ever before, seeks to place Burns as a 'mainstream' man of Enlightenment and Romantic impetus and to explain the enduring and sometimes controversial fascination for both the man and his work over more than two hundred years.

This collection of essays explores the historical importance and imaginative richness of Scotland's extensive contribution to modes of traditional culture and expression: ballads, tales and storytelling, and song. Its underlying aim is to bring about a more dynamic and inclusive understanding of Scottish culture. Rooted in literary history and both comparative and interdisciplinary in scope, the volume covers the key aspects and genres of traditional literature, including the Gaelic tradition, from the medieval period to the present. Key theoretical and conceptual issues raised by the historical analysis of Scotland's rich store of ballad, song, and folk narrative are discussed in separate chapters. The volume also explores why and how Scottish literary writers have been inspired by traditional genres, modes, and motifs, and the intermingling of folk and literary traditions in writers such as Burns, Scott, and Hogg. It also uncovers the folkloric and mythopoetic materials of early Scottish literature, and the vitality of neglected aspects of Scottish popular culture.

This wide-ranging collection is the first to set Robert Louis Stevenson in detailed social, political and literary contexts.The book takes account of both Stevenson's extraordinary thematic and generic diversity and his geographical range. The chapters explore his relation to late nineteenth-century publishing, psychology, travel, the colonial world, and the emergence of modernism in prose and poetry. Through the pivotal figure of Stevenson, the collection explores how literary publishing and cultural life changed across the second half of the nineteenth century. Stevenson emerges as a complex writer, author both of hugely popular boys' stories and of seminally important adult novels, as well as the literary figure who debated with Henry James the theory of fiction and the nature of realism.The collection shows how interest in the unconscious and changes in the conception of childhood demand that we re-evaluate our ideas of his writing. Individual essays by international experts trace Stevenson' lit

This is the first and only guide to Scottish Romanticism. It captures the best of critical debate as well as presenting exciting new approaches to a distinctively Scottish Romanticism in literary theory, religious studies, music and song and the thematic

This volume considers the major themes, texts and authors of Scottish literature of the twentieth and, so far, twenty-first century. It identifies the contexts and impulses that led Scottish writers to adopt their creative literary strategies. Moving beyond traditional classifications, it draws on the most recent critical approaches to open up new perspectives on Scottish literature since 1900. The volume's innovative thematic structure ensures that the most important texts or authors are seen from different perspectives whether in the context of empire, renaissance, war and post-war, literary genre, generation, and resistance. In order to provide thorough coverage, these thematic chapters are complemented by chronological 'Arcade' chapters, which outline the contexts of the literature of the period by decades, and by 'Overview' chapters which trace developments across the century in theatre, language and Gaelic literature. Taken together, the chapters provide a thorough and thought-provoking account of the century's literature.

The subcultural enfant terrible of devolutionary protest and rebellion, Irvine Welsh is now widely acknowledged as the founding father of a whole new tradition in post-devolution Scottish writing. The unprecedented worldwide success of Trainspotting, magnified by Danny Boyle's iconic film adaptation, revolutionised Scottish culture and radically remoulded the country's self-image from dreamy romantic hinterland to agitated metropolitan hotbed. Though Welsh's career is very much an ongoing phenomenon, his influence on contemporary Scottish literary history is already quite indisputable and enduring.

Robert Burns is Scotland’s greatest cultural icon. Yet, despite his continued popularity, critical work has been compromised by the myths that have built up around him. McGuirk focuses on Burns’s poems and songs, analysing his use of both vernacular Scots and literary English to provide a unique reading of his work.

This volume expounds the influence of Robert Burns’s reading of Philosophy on his life and work, supplementing this with his personal encounters with those philosophers he met. The work begins with the Homespun Philosophy of his early years under the tutelage of William Burnes and John Murdoch, then examines in detail some of the texts of John Locke, Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson, including other writers who reflect Hutcheson’s thinking. Further chapters include the exploration on Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Archibald Alison and William Greenfield. Robert Burns and the Philosophers does not purport to be a work of philosophy but rather to show the poet’s reaction to the subject and the development of his understanding. This work opens up a subject that hitherto has been almost unexplored.

The last three decades have seen unprecedented flourishing of creativity across the Scottish literary landscape, so that contemporary Scottish poetry constitutes an internationally renowned, award-winning body of work. At the heart of this has been the work of poets. As this poetry makes space for its own innovative concerns, it renegotiates the poetic inheritance of preceding generations. At the same time, Scottish poetry continues to be animated by writing from other places. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry is the definitive guide to this flourishing poetic scene. Its chapters examine Scottish poetry in all three of the nation's languages. It analyses many thematic preoccupations: tradition and innovation; revolutions in gender; the importance of place; the aesthetic politics of devolution. These chapters are complemented by extended close readings of the work of key poets that have defined this era, including Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, Aonghas MacNeacail and John Burnside.

Robert Burns in Global Culture is a collection which breaks new ground in treating Burns' poetry and influence in an international context. Widely recognized as poet of global significance in the nineteenth century, Burns' reputation has suffered from the critical turns in Romanticism since 1945 and is only now beginning to be seen in its proper context. Following on from the celebrations across the world to mark Burns' 250th anniversary in 2009, this collection asks questions concerning the nature of Burns' global influence in the United States, Europe and the Commonwealth, examines the extraordinary ways in which his writing combines a distinctively progressive agenda with deceptively traditional styles, and emplaces his reputation at the heart of questions of American exceptionalism, European democracy, British imperial identities, Italian politics, French literary history, questions of desire and sexuality, the Burns Supper and the extraordinary cult of Burns statues. 'Robert Burns in Global Culture' combines literary criticism, history, cultural theory and comparative literature to create a set of powerful, new and unique directions in the study of this major Romantic poet.