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Sood, Arun (2016) Eighty Years 'Owre the Sea': Robert Burns and the Early United States of America, C

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Sood, Arun (2016) Eighty Years 'Owre the Sea': Robert Burns and the Early United States of America, C Sood, Arun (2016) Eighty years 'Owre the Sea': Robert Burns and the early United States of America, c. 1786-1866. PhD thesis. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7397/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Eighty Years ‘owre the Sea!’: Robert Burns and the Early United States of America!, c.1786-1866 Arun Sood Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Scottish Literature School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow January 2016 © Arun Sood 2016 Abstract This thesis represents the first extensive critical study of the relationship between Robert Burns (1759-1796) and the early United States of America. Spanning literature, history and memory studies, the following chapters take an interdisciplinary approach towards investigating the methods by which Burns and his works rose to prominence and came to be of cultural and literary significance in America. Theoretically, these converging disciplines intersect through a transnational, Atlantic Studies perspective that shifts emphasis from Burns as the ‘national poet of Scotland’ onto the various socio-cultural connections that facilitated the spread of his work and reputation. In addition to Scottish literary studies, the thesis contributes to the broader fields of Transatlantic, Transnational and American Studies. Building on the foundation of Burns’s poetic engagements with American politics in Chapter I, subsequent chapters focus on the publication, dissemination, reception, literary influence, and cultural memory of the poet’s life and works up to the end of the American Civil War. Chapters II and III highlight how a thriving transatlantic reprint trade facilitated the spread of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in The Scottish Dialect; James Currie’s The Works of Robert Burns; and an abundance of other pirated biographical editions that were available by the mid-nineteenth century. Discussion of early American ‘imitators’ of Burns’s verse in Chapter IV leads to a broader assessment of Burns in relation to American vernacular poetry, with particular reference to Ulster-Scots-American poets and James Russell Lowell (1819- 1891). Employing methodologies derived from memory studies, Chapter V examines how Burns was ‘remembered’ in America through various nineteenth-century modes of commemoration. In conclusion, it argues that appropriations of Burns varied across and within geo-civic boundaries in America where, by the mid-nineteenth century, the poet had come to embody contested narratives, divergent ideologies, plural identities, and contradictory national histories. Previous studies have suggested that Burns‘s popularity in the early United States might be attributed to his kinship with ‘national’ American ideals of freedom, egalitarianism and individual liberty. While some of the evidence supports this claim, this thesis argues that it also wrongly assumes a spatiotemporal unity for the nineteenth-century American nation. I conclude by suggesting that future critical studies of the poet must heed the multifarious complexities of ‘national’ paradigms, pointing the way to further work on the reception and influence of Burns in other ‘global’ or, indeed, transnational contexts. This doctoral thesis was made possible by an AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) grant, awarded as part of the broader AHRC-funded ‘Editing Robert Burns for the Twenty-First Century’ project at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, The University of Glasgow. 2 Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………..004 Declaration……………………………….......................................................005 Introduction - A New Era of Burns Studies…………………………............006 Chapter I - ‘Thy harp, Columbia, let me take’: Burns’s American Works, c.1784-1794………………………........................024 Chapter II - ‘Tho’ I to foreign lands must hie’: Burns’s Poetry in America, c.1786-1799………………..................................060 Chapter III - ‘On Western Ground’: James Currie’s Works and American Print Editions, c.1800-1859….………..081 Chapter IV - ‘Bob’o’lincoms of our own’: Burns and American Poets, c.1800-1859…………………………….…….....117 Chapter V - ‘The West winds are murmuring it’: Burns and Cultural Memory in America, c.1800-1866….................................164 Concluding Remarks - The (Trans)National Poet …………………..............206 Appendix I……………………………………………………………............219 Thesis Bibliography………………………………………………….............237 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my primary supervisor Nigel Leask who has been an invaluable source of knowledge and inspiration. Every conversation nurtured new lines of intrigue and intellectual curiosity. I would also like to thank the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) for supporting me throughout my PhD and for permitting a fruitful research trip to The Library of Congress. I am grateful to Mary-Lou Reker and all staff at the John W. Kluge Center in Washington, D.C. for facilitating such a stimulating environment for scholars. Several staff and students at the University of Glasgow have helped me with this undertaking, in both personal and professional capacities. In particular, I would like to thank Jonathan Henderson who partly inspired this endeavour; Kirsteen McCue who has been a guiding force; and Joe Ryan-Hume for numerous coffee breaks and moral support. Additionally, sincere thanks to Gerard Carruthers, Craig Ronald Lamont, Christopher Macmillan, Michael Morris, Stephen Mullen, Rhona Brown, Andrew Hook, Simon Newman and Pauline Mackay. I would also like to thank Patrick Scott from the University of South Carolina who has helped with various queries and provided much advice. Indeed, part of the pleasure of researching historical transatlantic connections has been forming new ones along the way. Finally, I would like to thank my family for the unwavering support and belief through tides rough and smooth. Mum, Ashley, Chris, Vijay, John, and Elsa - you have all helped me to find the words that follow. Love to you all. 4 Declaration I declare that, except where explicit reference is made to the contribution of others, that this thesis is the result of my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree at the University of Glasgow or any other institution. Name: Arun Sood Date: 12.12.2015 5 Introduction A New Era of Burns Studies …one gets the sense of huge hinterlands, largely unexplored…From local sphere to global significance, the study of Burns and his poetry is entering a new era... 1 !Murray Pittock (2011) The early twenty-first century has seen a revitalised engagement with Robert Burns and his works through the resurgence of both academic and wider popular interest. The 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth in 2009 marked a significant moment for both Burns Studies in the academy and also the ongoing importance of the poet as a major cultural icon and touristic commodity. In an effort to encourage the wider Scottish diaspora to visit their ancestral ‘homeland’, the Scottish Government tied the 2009 Burns celebrations, along with other key ‘themes’ of the nation’s perceived culture and heritage, to the widely publicised ‘Year of Homecoming’;2 an incentive that was telling of both the iconic international appeal of Burns and also his economic importance to the tourist sector in Scotland (Burns tourism is worth approximately £160M a year).3 That the anniversary arrived at a time of ‘renewed Scottish political autonomy and cultural self-confidence’4 was also to be influential on the continuing academic shift towards reconsidering Burns as a serious literary figure whose work is deserving of scholarly investigation. As Murray Pittock has established, academic study of Burns suffered a steady decline from the 1930s onwards and was largely dismissed by those who set the twentieth-century ‘Romantic critical agenda’. Despite his wider appeal (he continued to ‘sell on bookstalls to people less well educated than those who claimed his work was sentimental doggerel’)5 and the availability of editions that demonstrated the full range and complexity of his oeuvre,6 Burns was frequently omitted from literary anthologies and did not even merit a mention in companions devoted to the Romantic period.7 Even later twentieth-century attempts to include Burns in the reimagined postwar Romantic canon – with its more nuanced approaches towards 1 Murray Pittock, ‘Introduction: Global Burns’, in Robert Burns in Global Culture, ed. by Murray Pittock (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011) 13-25 (23). 2 See <http://www.eventscotland.org/resources/downloads/get/42.pdf > [accessed 07/09/2015]. 3 Annual figures subject to variability. See Pittock, ‘Introduction: Global Burns’, 13. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 14. 6 Namely Thomas Crawford, Burns: A Study of The Poems and Songs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960) and The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. by James Kinsley, 3 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 7 For a contemporary
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