Burns and Other Poets - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0748664882 ISBN 13: 9780748664887

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2013

Synopsis

This book features new essays on Burns' special place in Scottish, English and Irish literary culture. This volume examines the innovative and technically accomplished nature of Burns' poetry. Close readings explore his dialogues with earlier poets such as John Milton, Thomas Gray, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson and these sit alongside analyses of the creative responses of his contemporaries and literary heirs including William Wordsworth, James Hogg, Thomas Dermody, Hugh MacDiarmid, George Mackay Brown, Don Paterson and Seamus Heaney. They demonstrate how Burns drew on Scottish vernacular traditions, English poetry and 18th-century sentimentalism to create his own, new kind of poetry. The contributors include leading poet-critics Douglas Dunn and the award-winning Burns author Robert Crawford alongside experts in poetry criticism Stephen Gill and Patrick Crotty. It features two poems written especially for the volume by Bernard O'Donoghue and Andrew McNeillie.

About this title

About the Author

David Sergeant is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Somerville College, the University of Oxford. Fiona Stafford is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

From the Back Cover

AUTHOR-APPROVEDBurns and Other PoetsEdited by David Sergeant and Fiona Stafford/New essays on Burns' special place in Scottish, English and Irish literary culture/In this volume 17 leading Burns scholars, poetry critics and practising poets reflect on the enduring significance of one of the most important poets of the eighteenth century. They show that Burns was a highly innovative and technically accomplished poet, as capable of transforming earlier traditions as of inaugurating new literary trends. Burns is considered alongside Scottish poets including Ramsay, Fergusson, Byron, Hogg, MacDiarmid, Paterson, Dunn and Mackay Brown; English and classical writers such as Milton, Addison, Gray, Wordsworth, and Virgil; and Irish figures from Merriman, Goldsmith and Dermody to Heaney.The chapters analyse Burns' relationship with the work of his predecessors, contemporaries and heirs; in exploring his debts and legacies they reveal the richness of his achievement. The political, national, philosophical and ethical aspects of his poetry are investigated, demonstrating the ways in which close readings are deepened by historical awareness.David Sergeant is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Somerville College, Oxford. He has written on Doris Lessing and Ted Hughes, is currently completing a book on Kipling's prose, and has published a collection of poetry, /Talk Like Galileo/.Fiona Stafford is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial fellow at Somerville College. Her first book, /The Sublime Savage/, was on James Macpherson's /Poems of Ossian/. More recent work includes /Starting Lines in Scottish, English and Irish Poetry: From Burns to Heaney/, and /Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry/.

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0748664882
• ISBN 13: 9780748664887
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Fiona Stafford, David Sergeant