The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns

Gerard Carruthers provides both a comprehensive introduction to and contemporary critical contexts for the study of Robert Burns. Detailed commentary on the artistry of Burns is complemented by works on the cultural reception and afterlife of this most iconic of world writers. Contributors examine the biographical legacy of Burns and his relationship with Scottish, Romanti

Gerard Carruthers provides both a comprehensive introduction to and contemporary critical contexts for the study of Robert Burns. Detailed commentary on the artistry of Burns is complemented by works on the cultural reception and afterlife of this most iconic of world writers. Contributors examine the biographical legacy of Burns and his relationship with Scottish, Romantic, and International cultures. Burns's engagements with ecology, gender, the pastoral, politics, pornography, slavery, and song-culture are also analyzed, including an extensive treatment of his publishing history, especially Burns's place in popular, bourgeois, and Enlightenment societies. This volume forms the most modern collection of critical responses to Burns, which, more than ever, recasts Burns as a "mainstream" man of the Enlightenment and Romantic period, explaining his enduring and sometimes controversial fascination for more than two hundred years.