This book is unashamedly aimed at a wider market than the ordinary academic volume, as it seeks to extend the impact of the research it contains, making it available to the worldwide community of Burns enthusiasts, without compromising on scholarship. Contributors have been selected not only for their academic rigour and reputation, but also because of their ability to handle their material with elegance and accessibility for the general reader. They offer fresh insights for both academic and general readers, not least through the volume’s interdisciplinary approaches, including a contribution from the great interpreter of Burns’s songs, Sheena Wellington. A key part of this volume’s attraction lies in the way it opens up fresh issues and aspects of performance and performativity and their impact on our perception of Robert Burns and his work.

Reading the essays together amply demonstrates the diverse ways in which Burns's poems and songs have been reimagined in performance since the eighteenth century, from the folkloric to the operatic, the national to the global. [...] Appealing to Burns scholars, the essays will be of interest to anyone interested in authorship and adaptation, performance and legacies of any hue. -- Daniel Cook, University of Dundee * Burns Chronicle *
This book is a reminder that experiencing Burns has always been as much a voice or an event as pages in a book. In our time, as in his own, Burns is encountered as recitation, on stage and screen, in speeches, preeminently as song, and in the drama and debates surrounding new discoveries and new editions. Contributors to this imaginative new interdisciplinary collection bridge the divide between performers and scholars, with readable but authoritative short essays that will spark interest in all Burnsians and open up new directions for Burns research. * Patrick Scott, University of South Carolina *

Ian Brown is Emeritus Professor in Drama at Kingston University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. He is the General Editor of The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (EUP: 2007) and widely published on aspects of theatre and literature. He is also a playwright and poet. Gerard Carruthers is Reader and Head of Department in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the forthcoming multi-volume Oxford University Press edition of the works of Robert Burns and is Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. He is also the author of Robert Burns (Northcote, 2006), editor of The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (ASLS, 2007), Burns: Poems (Everyman, 2006) and co-editor of Beyond Scotland: New International Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Rodopi, 2004), Walter Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge University Press, 2003).