The Language of Robert Burns

The Language of Robert Burns
Author: Alex Broadhead
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2013-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611485290

This monograph offers a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between the poetics and practice of Robert Burns and reevaluates the nature of his role in the history of Scots. By drawing on ideas from twenty-first-century sociolinguistic theory, it seeks to transform the debate surrounding Burns’s language. Through a series of readings that explore the way in which Burns used and commented on the styles associated with different places, groups and genres, it demonstrates how languages, places, and the identities associated with both are, in Burns’s writing, subject to continual reinvention. In this respect, the study breaks with existing accounts of the subject, insofar as it presents Scots, English and the other languages used by Burns not as fixed, empirically-observable entities, but as ideas that were revised and remade through the poet’s work. Focusing on Burns’s poems, songs, letters, prefaces, and glossaries, the book pays special attention to the complex ways in which the author engaged with such issues as phonology, grammar, and the naming of languages. The Burns who emerges from this book is not the marginal figure of traditional accounts—an under-educated poet alienated from the philological mainstream—but rather a well-informed thinker who, more than any other contemporary writer, embodies the creative linguistic spirit of the eighteenth century.

Understanding Robert Burns

Understanding Robert Burns
Author: Robert Burns
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Although recognised throughout the world, the poems of Robert Burns are rarely understood. This book gives readers an immediate understanding of 138 of his poems.

Collected Poems of Robert Burns

Collected Poems of Robert Burns
Author: Robert Burns
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
Total Pages: 676
Release: 1994
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781853264153

Born in 1759 into miserable rustic poverty, by the age of 18 Burns had acquired a good knowledge of both classical and English literature. This collection includes some of his most famous works such as the ballad "Auld Lang Syne", and "Tam o'Shanter".

A Red, Red Rose. the Love Poems of Robert Burns in Original Scots and Modern English

A Red, Red Rose. the Love Poems of Robert Burns in Original Scots and Modern English
Author: Derek Scott
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2009-03-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1409265005

18th century Scots poet Robert Burns wrote many of the most poignant and beautiful love poems of the period, primarily in the Scots language.In A Red, Red, Rose Derek Scott has translated eighty of the love poems and songs of Burns from the original Scots language into modern day English, making the works more accessible to a modern day reader.The works are printed both in the original Scots and modern English on adjacent pages to allow the reader to compare the versions easily.Included are many of Burns' most famous works: A Red, Red Rose; Ae Fond Kiss; and John Anderson, my Jo; as well as many less well known works.

A Night Out with Robert Burns

A Night Out with Robert Burns
Author: Robert Burns
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2009-01-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 184767450X

The Scottish poet Robert Burns has been idolised and eulogised. He has been sainted, painted, tarted-up and toasted. He is famous as the author of 'Auld Lang Syne', and he has long been the patron saint of the heartsore and the hungover. But what about the poems? Beneath the cult of Burns Nights and patriotic yawps, there is the work itself, among the purest and most truthful created in any age. This is a Burns collection like no other, introduced, arranged and contextualised by the award-winning novelist and essayist Andrew O'Hagan. Above all, it is an accessible edition made for the pleasure of reading that brings Burns' timeless work to full, riotous, colourful life.