Self‐Curation, Self‐Editing and Audience Construction by Eighteenth‐Century Scots Vernacular Poets

Abstract

This article analyses paratextual and self-editing practices in the work of three eighteenth-century Scots vernacular poets: Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. Taking the theories of paratext articulated by Gerard Genette and J. Hillis Miller as its starting-point, the article considers the varying ways in which these three poets fashioned their own literary personae and, simultaneously, their audience, through prefaces, footnotes and glossing practice. It also explores the relationship between the three poets, analysing the ways in which Burns learned from both Ramsay and Fergusson, and how each navigated his place as poet in the literary market-place.

Recent approaches to paratext studies in eighteenth‐century literature

“…Centring upon paratexts of Yiddish books produced in eighteenth‐century Amsterdam, Berger (2004) links with other paratextual investigations within English Studies and points towards a wider literary perception of paratexts as a space through which to justify publication, shape identity, and thus draw the book to the attention of its target audience. Later both Fetzer (2010) and Edson (2013) examine paratextual expressions of Scottishness, the former addressing Walter Scott's use of paratexts to ‘blur and obscure supposedly hard and fast cultural […] distinctions’ whilst the latter investigates Percival Stockdale's use of annotation to identify ‘Thomson as a Scottish poet and The Seasons as a specifically Scottish production’ Brown (2019) develops this idea, presenting examples such as Allan Ramsay's self‐presentation of Scottish identity via prefaces, footnotes, glossaries and frontispieces through which he ‘bolsters his poetic persona as a Scots vernacular “original”’. A complementary exploration of Welsh nationhood is provided by Edwards in (2015a) and (2015b), both of which address the use of annotation to textually present national identity.…”