Hugh Blair, Robert Burns, and the Invention of Scottish Literature

@article{McIlvanney2005HughBR,
  title={Hugh Blair, Robert Burns, and the Invention of Scottish Literature},
  author={Liam McIlvanney},
  journal={Eighteenth-Century Life},
  year={2005},
  volume={29},
  pages={25 - 46}
}
On 4 May 1787, the day before leaving Edinburgh after his eventful fi rst winter in the Scottish capital, Robert Burns wrote to the Reverend Hugh Blair, retired Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, thanking him for “that kindness, that patronage, that friendship” that the older man had shown him.1 The letter is not fulsome. It is fairly short; it has none of the vivid, Shandean banter that enlivens Burns’s letters to more congenial correspondents; and it is one of a… 
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Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres
This new edition of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, edited by Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran, answers the need for a complete, reliable text. Although the extent…
Devolving English Literature
This widely-praised book looks at the rise and fall of 'Britishness' in literature over the last three centuries. Arguing that for much of its history the subject of 'English Literature' has been…
The Scottish invention of English literature
Introduction Robert Crawford 1. From rhetoric to criticism Neil Rhodes 2. Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, and the institutions of English Ian Duncan 3. The prerequisites of power: Blair, belles lettres,…
Scotland and America in the age of the Enlightenment
Now in paperback this book displaces the notion that 18th-century Scotland and America were mere cultural provinces of England. It shows that Scottish religious culture, philosophy, medical…
The Letters of Robert Burns
TLDR
The Letters of Robert Burns is a complete revision of the earlier text established by J. De Lancey Ferguson and contains Currie's List of Letters to Burns, a document of major importance as it represents a selection of letters that were in the poet's possession at the time of his death.
Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland
In this text, the author looks behind the trivializing image of the "heav'n-taught ploughman" to uncover the intellectual context of the poet's political radicalism. He reveals Burns as a…
The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces
In the middle of the eighteenth century, English literature, composition, and rhetoric were introduced almost simultaneously into colleges throughout the British cultural provinces. Professorships of…
The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing
Introduction 1. Scripting identity?: English language and literacy instruction in the Highlands and the strange case of Alexander MacDonald 2. 'A grammarians regard to the genius of our tongue':…
An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815.
C.A. Bayly, Cambridge University Thomas Ertman, Harvard University John Brewer, UCLA John Robertson, Oxford University Daniel Baugh, Cornell University E.A. Wrigley, Cambridge University Joanna…
Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh
The Description for this book, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, will be forthcoming.
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