Scottish Pastoral: Robert Burns and British Romanticism

The book I will complete during the application period is entitled 'Scottish Pastoral: Robert Burn and British Romanticism' and sets out to recover a major Romantic poet in a Scottish, British, and colonial context. Burns's fame as Scotland's national bard, and his influence on Scottish writers like Hogg, Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lockhart, Wilson and Carlyle, has achieved local recognition. But much light remains to be cast on his literary and intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as his far-reaching influence on English and Irish Romantic writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Roscoe, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Clare, Hazlitt, De Quincey Tom Moore and J.C.Mangan. Burns's poetry is now largely excluded from a revised canon of Romantic literature as it is taught in UK and US English departments, despite the fact that the canon has broadened to include women and minority writers. In fact the decline of his reputation as a major Romantic poet has continued measurably even since 1945. Astonishingly, there is to date no dedicated study of Burns's influence on British Romanticism.

Contemporary Burns scholarship is still largely concerned with studying the poet in an exclusively national literary framework, despite important recent work by Carol McGuirk, Liam McIllvanney, Robert Crawford and Gerry Carruthers, opening up Burns to broader contexts. But the marginalisation of Burns as a major Romantic poet is not only self-imposed in this way, for as the editors of the recent essay collection Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism argue, from the 19th century Scottish literature came to stand for an 'inauthentic Romanticism, defined by a mystified commitment to history and folklore', in marginal relationship to an 'organic' English Romanticism. The goal of my monograph is to reassess the global significance of Scottish and British Romanticism in the light of Burns's achievement and influence, in line with new work inspired by a decentred 'Four Nations' model of British culture, and a more historically contextualised notion of the Scottish Enlightenment. The first part of my book aims to situate Burns and 18th century Scottish pastoral poetry in relation to Enlightenment theories and practices of agricultural improvement and agrarian patriotism; the second focuses on its wider dissemination after the poet's premature death in 1796, notably its influence upon British Romanticism, labouring class poetry, and the Scottish colonial diaspora .

Chapter Breakdown.
Introduction: Why Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect?
Chapter 1] Burns and Scottish Pastoral
Chapter 2] Burns and the Antiquarians.
Chapter 3] 'The Cottage leaves the Palace far Behind': The Cotter's Saturday Night and Pastoral Politics.
Chapter 4] Across the Shadow Line: Burns and British Romanticism.
Chapter 5] Beyond the Metropolitan Canon: Burns at Home and Abroad.