Self‐Curation, Self‐Editing and Audience Construction by Eighteenth‐Century Scots Vernacular Poets

Rhona Brown

doi:10.1111/1754-0208.12605

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyses paratextual and self‐editing practices in the work of three eighteenth‐century Scots vernacular poets: Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. Taking the theories of paratext articulated by Gerard Genette and J. Hillis Miller as its starting‐point, the article considers the varying ways in which these three poets fashioned their own literary personae and, simultaneously, their audience, through prefaces, footnotes and glossing practice. It also explores the relationship between the three poets, analysing the ways in which Burns learned from both Ramsay and Fergusson, and how each navigated his place as poet in the literary market‐place.

Highlights

This article analyses paratextual and self-editing practices in the work of three eighteenth-century Scots vernacular poets: Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns
This article offers three case studies taken from the publishing histories of Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns to demonstrate the crucial roles played by prefaces, footnotes and glossaries in each poet’s career, and in the development of eighteenth-century Scots vernacular poetry
If some nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish critics have been slow to respond to the cultural, political and literary implications of Scots vernacular poetry, the study of paratext is itself a relatively novel critical phenomenon, often seen as emanating from the prominence of Gérard Genette’s Paratexts (1987), with its definition of textual apparatus as constituting a formal ‘threshold’ that is laden with critical meaning.[6]

Summary

Allan Ramsay

Fergusson and Burns all benefited from the transformation of reading that took place throughout the eighteenth century. This rhetorical strategy opens up his text to non-Scots speakers and at the same time legitimises Scots as a literary language When he allows non-native readers into this Scots vernacular world with his often careful and always detailed glosses, their entry is on Ramsay’s terms: while introducing Scots vocabulary, such as ‘Snaw’ and ‘thrawn’, into apparently English translations, Ramsay cultivates his role as a literary and linguistic gatekeeper. While he may be ignorant (or so he contends) of the ancient languages, his paratextual practice confirms the assertion of the preface that he is supremely knowledgeable about the variety and nuance of his ‘Mother Tongue’. Ramsay makes the case for the status of Scots as a literary language, while mediating meaning for non-Scots speakers through active paratext

Robert Fergusson

Robert Burns

Conclusion