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Description of  Beside the Bard: Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850)

Beside the Bard argues that Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational political and cultural affiliations. This fluid conception of the nation may accommodate a post-Union British self-identification, but it also recognizes the instrumental and historically contingent nature of Britishness. Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, Read more