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The Collected Works of Robert Fergusson

Edited by Rhona Brown

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£150.00

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Published 28 February 2027

About this book

The first modern, transparently edited Collected Works of Robert Fergusson

  • Employs first printings of Fergusson’s works as copytext, minimising textual corruption and restoring the texts’ immediate contexts/publications in the Scottish periodical press
  • Provides full collation of variants between manuscript and multiple print sources
  • Offers complete and detailed explanatory/contextual annotations and extensive textual apparatus, including an expanded glossary

This book aims to transform academic and popular perception of this influential and often misrepresented Scottish poet of the mid-eighteenth century. It offers the first full, consistent and transparently edited textual edition of Fergusson’s works alongside extensive annotations, collation of textual variants, explanatory notes and an expanded Scots glossary. Fergusson’s textual legacy has been repeatedly corrupted since his death in 1774, and editors have taken several liberties with the poet’s texts, language and presentation.

The present edition strips away these interventions to present Fergusson’s entire corpus, including manuscript texts which have not yet been incorporated into the poet’s known works, offering the first reliable edition of Fergusson’s works for a twenty-first-century academic audience in the context of the 250th anniversary of Fergusson’s death in 2024.

Reviews

Burns’s praise for the ‘wildly-sounding, rustic lyre’ he heard in Fergusson has secured but also limited the reputation of his prodigious forerunner. Rhona Brown’s comprehensive, rigorously edited volume gives us the full Fergusson – formally innovative, thematically capacious, satirical and elegiac, Scots and English – in all his thrilling variety.
Table of contents

Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Biography of Robert Fergusson
Introduction: The Collected Works of Robert Fergusson
The Poems
Notes on the Poems
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Rhona Brown

Rhona Brown is Professor of Scottish Textual Cultures at the University of Glasgow. Her research is focused on Scottish literature of the eighteenth century, particularly poetry in Scots, literary and cultural networks of the period and the early Scottish periodical press. She has published widely on eighteenth-century Scottish poetry and has had a particular focus the work of Robert Fergusson; her first monograph was Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012). She is an expert on the eighteenth-century periodical press, and was co-editor, with Alex Benchimol and David Shuttleton, of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015). Rhona is also an experienced textual editor, having edited Allan Ramsay’s Poems (2 Volumes, 2023) and co-edited, with Dr Craig Lamont, Ramsay’s Prose (2024).