Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory 17861866 by Arun Sood

Abstract

MLR, .,   In this way—and impressively, given the amount of scholarly ink that has been spilled on this topic—Yahav advances understandings of both Richardson’s technique of ‘writing to the moment’ and his interactions with readers, such as Lady Bradshaigh, who proposed alternative endings to Clarissa. It is not (or not simply) that Richardson had a monomaniacal need to control interpretations of his works, but that the long-term process of judging, on the part of both characters and readers, was central to his literary project. Focusing also on musicological treatises, elocutionist writings, and aesthetic theory, Yahav demonstrates that duration was both individual and shared—based on patterns originating in the human body—in a manner that the novel genre was uniquely able to take advantage of. While the duration of a single reading is necessarily finite, collective engagement with a work endures. As she writes of Tristram Shandy’s deployment of patterns of embodied rhythm, ‘[a]s long as there are readers who can get Sterne’s rhythmic prose [. . .] qualitative duration will continue to be felt and human time will continue to endure’ (p. ). Feeling Time capably integrates a thorough understanding of eighteenth-century theories of temporality—from those of major figures such as Locke and Hume to less famliar figures such as the musicologist Roger North—with incisive readings of canonical novels to offer a new view of the particular purchase of the novel genre in the eighteenth century. While a variety of writers may have been concerned with the question of how we know time, it was through novels that readers could not only contemplate but also experience duration as a qualitative moment that offered an alternative to the relentless forward march of the clock. U  C, S B R S K Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory – . By A S. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . viii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Such is the international popularity of Burns Night that no one can doubt the global reach of Robert Burns, especially in places touched by the Scottish diaspora. But what will astonish readers of Robert Burns and the United States of America is the extent to which the poet’s name and words were visible in the early decades of the American republic. ose opposed to slavery cited his works in defence of their cause, and so did those who propagated it. He was invoked by Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Twain; and, as Arun Sood reveals in a highly informative subchapter on ‘James Lowell and American Vernacular Verse’ (pp. –), he was the model on which many less familiar writers attempted to create an American dialect writing tradition. It is a great strength of this book that it does not treat the question of reception in a unidirectional way, preferring instead to chart the ways in which Burns both drew from and contributed to the emerging idea of America. Sood’s study does an impressive job of charting the different forms of exchange that connected Burns before and aer his death to a country he had never seen at first hand. roughout,  Reviews Sood reads a diverse body of texts by the light of memory studies and transnationalism : two theories which allow him to emphasize the movement of Burns’s work across borders both temporal and national, where traditionally Burns has tended to be read through an overdetermined sense of his time and place. Among the source materials he draws on, we find (alongside more expected texts) pirated editions of Burns’s work, the ‘constitutional documents’ (p. ) of the Ku Klux Klan, and the proceedings of the first American ‘Burns Supper’ (p. ). e resulting picture is both panoramic and highly detailed. Following an Introduction, Chapter  offers a well-researched account of the poems Burns composed on American topics, contextualizing them in relation not only to contemporary events across the Atlantic, but also to British parliamentary politics and Burns’s own social networks. e succeeding chapter traces in depth the patterns of trade and circulation that facilitated the early dissemination of Burns’s work in the United States. Particularly notable here is Sood’s consideration of the ways in which the...