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 affiliations.
Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, urban or rural, literati or autodidacts, Scottish Lowland poets in the age of Burns adamantly refuse to imagine a single British nation. Instead, they pose the question of “Scotland” as a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation.
