2 results
4 - Robert Burns and the Scottish Bawdy Politic
-
- By Hamish Mathison, University of Sheffield
- Edited by Carol Margaret Davison, University of Windsor, Monica Germanà, University of Westminster
-
- Book:
- Scottish Gothic
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 December 2017
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2017, pp 42-58
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Where are the Jesters now? the Men of Health
Complexionally pleasant? (Blair 1743: 9; original emphasis)Oft-times, Lowland Scots wrote of death in the eighteenth century without engaging in what we now call ‘Scottish Gothic’. Witness Robert Blair, above, Edinburgh-born, as he brings the adverb ‘complexionally’ to an otherwise straightforward example of the ancient and melancholy ubi sunt trope.1 Blair's melancholy is here expressed in a fantastically influential poem called The Grave (1743). Blair's fascinating poem, to which this chapter will return at its conclusion, is rightly held to be foundational for the study of what until recently was thought of as a pan- British ‘Graveyard School’ of poetry. That label describes an extremely loose collection of mid-eighteenth-century authors whose poems were written in a more or less ‘standard’ English, and often troped the graveyard. The category invokes such disparate poets as the English-born Thomas Gray and Edward Young or the Scottish-born James Thomson and James Beattie. There are many good poems on death, demise, and the supernatural realm written by Scottish and English authors during the eighteenth century. What actually differentiates a Lowland ‘Scottish Gothic’ poetry from not dissimilar poetry on death (‘Gothic’ or otherwise) in the eighteenth century is not only a turn to a Scots lexis but also a profound and foundational localism. The incorporation of local thought marks the difference between Scottish writing of the Gothic and all the other forms of expression that have come to take the adjective ‘Gothic’. Since the eighteenth century, every attempt to ground a Gothic work in a particular time and place relies upon the temporal and spatial architecture laid down by early practitioners in the Scottish eighteenth century. What this chapter argues is that Scottish Gothic verse needs to be read carefully both in terms of its emergence in time as well as its geographical specificity. Consider the opening quotation from Robert Blair: his title offers the reader just ‘the’ grave. The definite article (‘the …’) is most indefinite: it is designed to indicate all of our graves; from that there follows the poem's ambitious scope. For the poem to succeed on its own terms, it cannot offer ‘that spot just there’ as we will find the Burnsian locale to be.
Chapter 2 - On Robert Burns: Enlightenment, Mythology and the Folkloric
-
- By Hamish Mathison, University of Sheffield, UK
- Edited by Matthew Campbell, Michael Perraudin
-
- Book:
- The Voice of the People
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 05 July 2012
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2012, pp 21-34
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
[…] what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though […] it […] would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore, – the Lore of the People).
W. J. Thoms (writing under the pseudonym of Ambrose Merton) in The Athenaeum, 22 August 1846, 862–3The Scottish poet Robert Burns was born in 1759 and died in 1796. He is best known for Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), for his long comic narrative poem Tam o' Shanter (1791), and for his activity as a collector of Scottish songs. Here, considering Burns in the context of a European folk revival, it is Tam that is the subject of investigation. In what follows, there are two contexts that support the principal argument. Those are an attention to Burns's extensive activity in the field of song collection around the time of Tam o' Shanter, and an attention to his use of folkloric material in poetry prior to 1791. The two are connected, and not least by his European reception in the nineteenth century: his poetry and song was widely translated and circulated in nineteenth-century Europe, and whilst this chapter does not touch particularly on translations of Burns, of which there are some 1,000 recorded by 1899, it is perhaps there that his broader European significance lies. In terms of the folkloric, however, in Britain, his position on the transitional edge of British literary Romanticism, as it emerges out of the eighteenth and slides into the nineteenth century, is hugely important.