Literary Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Club Poetry
Andrews, Corey

Description

This work provides a critical analysis of a neglected yet vital element of Scottish literature in the 18th century, covering the crucial period from the Union of 1707 to the revolutionary turmoil of the 1790s. It examines the literary output of several important clubs in eighteenth-century Scotland in an innovative fashion, offering the first book-length study of the club poetry of Scotland’s most significant eighteenth-century poets, Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns.

Reviews

“The great achievement of [this work] is how it illuminates a crucial, yet long-neglected aspect of Scottish club society – the role of poets in fostering sustained opposition to the enforced drive toward assimilation – and thus complicates our perspective on the political valence of Scottish culture in general. Readers of this book will come away with an enriched understanding of how “difference” emerges as a term mediating the relations between a dominant and a subordinate people, and how that term comes to accrue both meaning and power. By imagining a community of Scots and proposing alternatives to its future in the face of overwhelming hegemony, club poets kept alive a concept of nationhood that is only now being realized. [This work] helps complete the picture of Scotland’s history of resistance.” – (From the Commendatory Preface) Linda Zionkowski, Ohio University

"Corey Andrew's study of Scottish clubs as venues for projecting the ideals of community set out in the poetry of Allan Ramsay, James Fergusson, and Robert Burns merits attention for its archival explorations of the world of urbane sociability that emerged in post-Union Scotland ... The exploration of the unpublished manuscript remains of the Cape Club in particular offers a wealth of insight into the playful world of club mockery. Reading through these case histories, one gets a sense of the social texture of literary conversation in these sodalities." - Eighteenth-Century Life

"Corey Andrews's book should interest scholars working on social clubs in 18th-century Edinburgh, the verse and song produced by clubs, reactions to Scotland's union with England, and especially the poetry of Allen Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and Robert Burns. After an introduction creating theoretical frameworks, as much social as literary, the book offers three long chapters on the club poetry of Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns, each interesting in itself yet part of a continuum of critical and historical ideas launched in the introduction, the foremost reflected in the title, Literary Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Club Poetry." - The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

Table of Contents

Table of Contents: Acknowledgements Preface Introduction 1. Allan Ramsay, Club Life, and Scottish Nationalism 2. Robert Fergusson, Conviviality, and the Cape Club 3. Robert Burns and the Character of Scottish Nationalism Bibliography Index

ISBN10:  0-7734-6463-8   ISBN13:  978-0-7734-6463-6    Pages:  378    Year:  2004   

Series: Studies in British Literature Number: 82

Subject Area: British - Literature 

Imprint: Edwin Mellen Press

USA List Price: $119.95 UK List Price: £ 74.95  

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