The Burnsian Palimpsest: Robert Burns in American Cultural Memory, c. 1840-1866

Abstract

Arguably more so than any other eighteenth-century literary figure, the political and popular legacy of Robert Burns has been continually contested, revised and appropriated to various ends. As recently as the 2015 UK General Election, the Scottish branch of the right-wing populist United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) attempted to win the hearts (if not the minds) of Scottish voters by producing posters emblazoned with lines from Burns’s ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’; while, previously, the opposing Scottish Nationalist Party strategically launched an electoral campaign on the poet’s birthday (Tempest 2005). Contests were also waged over Burns’s presumed political leanings during the 2014 Scottish Referendum, as he was variably cast as a Unionist or Nationalist across several media outlets (Maddox 2012).