When talking about the Enlightenment, ornithology is seldom the first topic of conversation. Still, Enlightenment and ornithology converge in one important respect, that of abundance. In our time, new-wave ornithologists have renewed their faith in eighteenth-century expectations for the discovery of a gigantic number of bird species. It is at this intersection between abundant modern science and ambitious Enlightenment ideology that this remarkable collection of five essays on Alexander W...

This volume collects the most essential of the immortal poems and songs of Scotland's beloved national bard. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.With the publication of his first book of poems in 1786, Robert Burns—the twenty-seven-year-old son of a farmer—became a national celebrity, hailed as the "Ploughman Poet." When he died ten years later, ten thousand people came to pay their respects at his funeral, and in the two centuries since then he has inspired a cultli...

The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns treats the extensive writing of and culture surrounding Scotland's national 'bard'. Robert Burns (1759-96) was a producer of lyrical verse, satirical poetry, in English and Scots, a song-writer and song-collector, a writer of bawdry, journals, commonplace books and correspondence. Sculpting his own image, his untutored rusticity was a sincere persona as much as it was not entirely accurate. Burns was an antiquarian, national patriot, pioneer of ...

Literature and Union opens up a new front in interdisciplinary literary studies. There has been a great deal of academic work--both in the Scottish context and more broadly--on the relationship between literature and nationhood, yet almost none on the relationship between literature and unions. This volume introduces the insights of the new British history into mainstream Scottish literary scholarship. The contributors, who are from all shades of the political spectrum, will inter...

The 1820 Scottish Rising has been increasingly studied in recent decades. This collection of essays looks especially at local players on the ground across multiple regional centres in the west of Scotland, as well as the wider political circumstances within government and civil society that provide the rising's context. It examines insurrectionist preparation by radicals, the progress of the events of 1820, contemporary accounts and legacy memorialisation of 1820, including newspaper and l...

Scotland's rich literary tradition is a product of its unique culture and landscape, as well as of its long history of inclusion and resistance to the United Kingdom. Scottish literature includes masterpieces in three languages - English, Scots and Gaelic - and global perspectives from the diaspora of Scots all over the world. This Companion offers a unique introduction, guide and reference work for students and readers of Scottish literature from the pre-medieval period to the post-devolu...