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Fickle Man: Robert Burns in the 21st Century

This book addresses the question of Burns relation to the civil, social and artistic culture of his time, and enduring to this day. Besides the Introduction, the authored chapter addresses the architectural memorialisation of the poet asking what was the impetus behind, and the meanings of the various architectural constructions (from the early 19th to the present day) built in Burns’s honour.

The five main architectural monuments to Burns are examined in the light of relationship between poets (and poetry) and architecture. They are subject at once to a cultural and architectural critique, which invetigates what architectonic methods and procedure can contribute to an understanding of the structures of poesy at large, and to Burns’s work in poetry and other forms.

The book was launched at the University of Glasgow’s International Conference to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth (January 2009). In March 2011 a paper examining the memorialising of Burns in space ‘Memorial Space: Burns is Spaced Out Man’ was given to the AHRC-funded Conference ‘The Objects of Poetry’, organised by Professors MacDonald and Whatley at Dundee University. The proceedings from that conference are to be published in collection by Ashgate. Fickle Man has been reviewed in academic peer review journals including Eighteenth Century Scotland, No 23, Spring 2009 and Scottish Literary Review (Journal of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies) Autumn/winter 2010.

This work has been cited in subsequent publications including Prof. Nigel Leask in his 2010 book ‘Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Eighteenth Century Scotland’, Oxford University Press, 2010; by Eric J Graham in ‘Burns and the Sugar Plantocracy of Ayrshire’, AANHS, 2010; by James E May in ‘Studies of Authorship in the Long 18th Century’. It is cited several times in ‘The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism’, EUP, 2011.