Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns

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.Key Features *Modern critical approaches to Burns: including readings of biographical construction, gender and publishing and reception history *Detailed discussion of the cultural afterlife of Burns *Location of Burns in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods *Entirely new readings of Burns's major poems

Scrupulously academic ! A definitive survey of the present state of Burns Studies ! Taken together, these essays provide enormous stimulation for readers familiar with Burns, who will go back to the poems with new insights from every essay. What sets this collection apart from its predecessors is that many of these studies, taken individually, provide benchmark accounts to which teachers will send students as starting points for their own essays on particular aspects of Burns's work. -- Robert Irvine, University of Edinburgh The Byron Journal The Scotsman Books of the year: Writers' choice Readable, bite-sized, and fresh introductions to an admirably eclectic range of Burns-related topics. -- Christopher Whatley The Scotsman The Edinburgh Companion is a sprightly collection of new essays well edited by Gerard Curruthers ... This is an excellent volume, nicely produced ... and admirably presented. -- Bernard Beatty, Universities of Liverpool and St Andrews Scotia Scrupulously academic ! A definitive survey of the present state of Burns Studies ! Taken together, these essays provide enormous stimulation for readers familiar with Burns, who will go back to the poems with new insights from every essay. What sets this collection apart from its predecessors is that many of these studies, taken individually, provide benchmark accounts to which teachers will send students as starting points for their own essays on particular aspects of Burns's work. The Scotsman Books of the year: Writers' choice Readable, bite-sized, and fresh introductions to an admirably eclectic range of Burns-related topics. The Edinburgh Companion is a sprightly collection of new essays well edited by Gerard Curruthers ... This is an excellent volume, nicely produced ... and admirably presented.

Gerard Carruthers is Reader and Head of Department in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the forthcoming multi-volume Oxford University Press edition of the works of Robert Burns and is Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. He is also the author of Robert Burns (Northcote, 2006), editor of The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (ASLS, 2007), Burns: Poems (Everyman, 2006) and co-editor of Beyond Scotland: New International Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Rodopi, 2004), Walter Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge University Press, 2003).