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Before Burns

by Dr Christopher McLachlan

ISBN: 9781841952536
Imprint: Canongate Classics
Publication Date: Jun 2008
Format: Paperback
Price: £9.99
Stock Status: in stock

A collection of the Scots poems and songs from the eighteenth century which created a literary tradition of vernacular directness which Burns drew upon and shared. Before Burns includes a substantial selection from the work of Allan Ramsey and Robert Fergusson (Burns’s ‘elder brother in the muse’), as well as a wider selection from the writers, male and female, whose good-humoured accessibility so characterised the poetry of their time. Christopher MacLachlan’s introduction puts these words into perspective and makes a case for a linguistic confidence, rather than an insecurity, in their vigorous use of both English and Scots.

Dr Christopher MacLachlan was born and brought up in Edinburgh, at which university he received his M.A. degree and his Ph.D. He was subsequently appointed to lectureship in the Department (now School) of English at the University of St. Andrews, where he is now Senior Lecturer. Dr MacLachlan’s areas of specialisation include eighteenth-century English and Scottish literature, the Scottish Enlightenment and modern Scottish literature. He has published articles on Burns, Hume, Hogg, John Buchan and Muriel Spark, as well as editing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey for Penguin Classics, for whom he also edited Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel, The Monk. He is married with two children.

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