Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Greater Atlanta, GA, USA
Email: jurascot@earthlink.net

Patrick Scott has been extremely kind and generous to Robert Burns Lives! in the past but particularly during the last few months. His latest contribution is an article honoring a dear friend of his (and mine) known affectionately by his many colleagues as Ronnie Jack. I had heard many of my Burnsian friends speak of Ronnie with great respect and kindness, and I finally met him at a Burns conference at the University of South Carolina in April 2009. As I recall, we sat together that night and he was everything I had heard about him - a gentleman in the first degree! Ronnie contributed an article to the pages of Robert Burns Lives! later on and you can find it in our website index. Since then, when my thoughts would make rounds of the different friends I had made in Scotland, he would always come to mind. He was the man I always remembered with a smile and a warm look on his face. Although his body had aged, his mind never did and much wisdom was shared with his friends. (FRS: 1.5.17)

Ronnie Jack and Robert Burns: An Appreciation
By Patrick Scott

Professor Ronnie Jack

For more than forty years, “R.D.S. Jack” (Ronnie Jack), who died shortly before Christmas, has been one of the most distinctive voices in Robert Burns studies.  He was well known and first known as a scholar on other aspects of Scottish literature, and more formal tributes elsewhere will no doubt do justice to the fuller range of his accomplishments, but it seems appropriate that Robert Burns Lives! should include an appreciation of his published writing about Burns. More than almost any other recent Scottish critic of Burns, Ronnie Jack showed immense regard for Burns’s achievement as poet, judged by the highest standards, while rejecting bardolatry and the common urge to excuse weak writing merely because Burns was expressing admirable or memorable sentiments.

Ronnie Jack was born in 1941, in Ayr, one of a generation of Scottish scholars who came of academic age in the 1960s, almost the first generation able to build careers in Scottish universities as specialists in Scottish literature.  Looking back in later life, he commented several times on the situation when he was young, recalling that, in the 1950s and early 60s,

the place of Scottish authors within the nation’s education system had reached a nadir. My school and university education coincided with that period. From 1954 until 1964, within the Scottish educational heartland of Ayr Academy and Glasgow University, I was given an excellent introduction to the English Literary Tradition as defined by F.R. Leavis. But of Scottish authors only Burns featured at school, and only Burns and Scott in the Glasgow honours lecture course … Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens loomed large and remain enthusiasms for me but it was a consciousness that Scottish literature had been sidelined that led me to choose a Scottish thesis topic (Jack, “Where stands,” p.52).

He later recounted that his early experience of Burns’s poetry had not been in formal academic work, but in recitation or performance. The schools competitions organized by the Burns Federation attracted thousands of children, especially at junior secondary level, all reciting from the same prescribed selection of Burns poems or singing Burns’s songs solo or in school choirs:

Born near Burns’ birthplace, and educated at Ayr Academy, I was not introduced to Ayrshire’s bard as part of the academic curriculum. That was confined to English authors. Instead we all had to recite or sing his verses. Thus we all became masters in memorizing. Having heard ‘Ca’ the yowes’ sung thirty times, you never forget the words! (Jack, “Burns as Dramatic Poet,” p. 38).

As a schoolboy, Ronnie took part in these competitions, and he once performed Burn’s “Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn” (“Scots wha hae”) for an important foreign visitor:

At the age of twelve, I recited that poem for the great Russian translator, Samuel Marshak. At the end, he congratulated me on being “A fine little soldier.” Saving his memory, this was inaccurate; I would have made a truly reluctant soldier (ibid., p. 41).

Characteristically, Ronnie takes Marshak’s compliment, not as a tribute to his own dramatic skill, but to make a point about Burns’s dramatic ability to create, and let his readers inhabit, voices and personalities quite unlike his or their own.  But performing Burns was in fact a skill that Ronnie retained and honed and polished over the years, enhancing his teaching, delighting varied audiences, and influencing his own critical understanding of Burns’s work (cf. also Wojtas, 1998).

The situation as regards Scottish literary studies had not significantly improved when Ronnie moved on to Glasgow University, where, after initially starting out in law, he graduated M.A. in 1964 with first class honours in English.  He later wrote that “There were no courses in Scottish Literature as such. To gain an introduction to the subject, one had to be enrolled in Scottish History and attend Alexander Scott's lecture on Friday mornings” (Jack, “In ane uther leid,” 164).

What changed for Ronnie’s generation, however, were the new opportunities for postgraduate research in Scottish literature and the increased chance of a university teaching position in Scotland itself as Scottish universities rapidly expanded in the wake of the baby boom and the Robbins Report. On graduation, Ronnie moved to Edinburgh to do research on renaissance Scottish poetry, supervised by Prof. John MacQueen, then recently returned from a period teaching at Washington University in the United States, and later for many years head of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies. After one year, Ronnie was appointed as an assistant lecturer, the lowest academic rank, but soon became lecturer, and married Kirsty in 1967.  Thereafter he moved steadily up the Edinburgh academic ladder, serving for a period as associate dean, then in 1978 earning promotion to Reader (a promotion based on research), and ultimately in 1987, to a personal chair as Professor of Scottish and Mediaeval Literature, a title he held till his retirement in 2004. He was awarded his PhD by Edinburgh in 1968, and his DLitt by Glasgow in 1990.  In 2000, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was also an honorary fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and of Glasgow University’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies.

It was not till 1972, when he was already well-established as one of the experts on Scottish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that Ronnie first published anything about Burns, five brief pages in a book largely dealing with other authors. By then he had produced at least ten articles on earlier Scottish topics, including a series of articles on Renaissance poetry in Studies in Scottish Literature in 1965, 1967, 1968, and 1971. The book, titled The Italian Influence in Scottish Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 1972), dealt briskly with Burns’s few, largely-disparaging, remarks about fashionable preferences for Italian composers over Scottish traditional music and song, though Ronnie also commented on Burns’s brief interest in Petrarchan poetry during his first winter in Edinburgh, and  he tracked down Italian sources behind two of Burns’s own songs, “Stay, my charmer, can you leave me” (Kinsley, I: 386), and “Behold the hour, the boat arrive!” (Kinsley II: 713-714). Even though the second of these songs was sent to Clarinda, Ronnie sees them both in terms of rhetoric or poetic craftsmanship, rather than romantic sincerity.  More quotable, however, is Ronnie’s willingness, even as a young Scottish academic, to label Burns “a staunchly parochial poet” (p. 164).

His next venture into Burns criticism was more substantial.  In collaboration with Andrew Noble, of Strathclyde University, he coedited a Burns volume, The Art of Robert Burns, for the Vision Press series Critical Studies. While the volume is suitably polite about such pioneer academic Burnsians as David Daiches, Thomas Crawford,  and the contributors to Donald Low’s superficially-similar collection ten years earlier, Jack and Noble had invited a different generation of contributors. Their agenda was self-consciously revisionist, to emphasize Burns as a poetic artist, focusing on his achievement in varied poetic genres.  The volume reprints a notable polemic from the American Burns (and MacDiarmid) scholar John C. Weston on the strand of bitterness in Burns’s radical politics, and Andrew Noble himself wrote on Burns as romantic revolutionary, but more characteristic are the essays on Burns and lyric poetry (by Iain Crichton Smith), Burns and narrative, and Burns and the verse epistle.  There is a still-influential early essay by Ronnie’s near contemporary at Glasgow (and Andrew Noble’s colleague at Strathclyde) Ken Simpson, on Burns’s rhetorical skill and playfulness as a letter-writer. Ronnie himself contributed a full-length and discriminating essay on Burns and Bawdy, a topic not well treated in the Low volume, pointing out the religious and parodic elements in Burns’s bawdy poems (this essay was later made more widely available as Robert Burns Lives!, no. 166). The introduction to the volume was credited jointly to the two editors, and presumably each drafted different sections, but Ronnie’s name appears first, and the opening announces several themes that would recur in Ronnie’s later Burns scholarship:

Inevitably, a new generation brings with it a new perspective…. What we sought in all our contributors … was critical intelligence, the function of which is always to question the facile assumptions and dull, received opinions which can accrue round even the greatest of writers.  Burns’s genius, more than most, has been overlaid by such banal accretions…. Crawford’s essential virtue is his anti-parochial attitude … his awareness of the quite extraordinary elusive nature of both Burns’s personality and his rhetorical and poetical modes. Capable of a stark, simple lyricism, [Burns]  was the least simple of men. … the complexity of Burns’s language in relation to the convoluted manoevurings, spontaneous or imposed, of that seemingly almost fissiparous personality is subject to extended analysis in several of these essays…[, as is]   Burns’s use and arguable abuse of a poetic persona; the distinction discernible between the creativity present in his best, mainly early, poetry and songs and the much more questionable ‘self-creativity’ displayed in his letters… (Jack and Noble, “Introduction,” pp. 7-9).

While the book was widely reviewed, and reviewers were respectful about Ronnie’s own contribution, not everyone liked the emphasis on poetic technique; David Murison memorably commented in Notes & Queries that the book was “more concerned with Burns’s histrionics than with his art,” and the Burns Chronicle called it “unduly iconoclastic” (cf. also Donald Low in Review of English Studies). For many of us coming at Burns from later literature, the separation between art and message or form and content seems artificial—useful as focusing attention on the complexity of what the poems say, rather than being an end in itself.  Nonetheless, The Art of Robert Burns staked out a distinctive position on Burns, and several of its essays have been deservedly influential. 

The book led to Ronnie being actively recruited as a speaker at a succession of subsequent major Burns conferences, both in Scotland and the United States.  Indeed, almost all his subsequent writing about Burns was occasional, originating in these invited lectures.  But he must have resisted far more speaking opportunities than he accepted, and one of his strengths in writing on Burns was that he never became just a Burnsian. He must be one of the few Burns scholars of his generation who never, as far as I know, edited a Burns selection or contributed to the Burns Chronicle. His primary scholarly focus remained medieval and Renaissance Scottish literature, to which he added, from the 1980s onwards, a serious research interest in the plays of J.M. Barrie.  Of Ronnie’s ninety or more publications, fewer than ten per cent are centred on Burns.  His Burns criticism gets much of its freshness and originality from his rooting, wide as well as deep, not only in earlier Scottish literature but in the wider European literary tradition.

Ronnie’s next Burns publication, a talk on “Robert Burns as Poet of Freedom” given at Old Dominion University in Virginia, came out the same year as the Burns book.  Ronnie once said he had to remind himself before a lecture that “I must be duller, I must be duller’” (Wotjas), and to a largely non-Burnsian audience at Old Dominion he gave a classic three-part expository lecture, tracking Burns’s attitudes through three freedoms: personal freedom or liberty in life and thought, social freedom or equality, and national freedom or patriotism. It might seem an unusual topic for a critic generally more interested in poetic skill than political themes. Nonetheless, the lecture offers things to surprise many conventional Burnsians. Early in the talk, Ronnie comments:
 

Neither drink nor love constitutes a major part of Burns’s personal philosophy of freedom, for although effective briefly they are but brief floutings of a Fate which will return unappeased later (Jack, “Freedom,” p. 43).

On social freedom, he shows how Burns not only satirizes and castigates social injustice but also stresses the dignity of laboring-class life (an interesting anticipation of more recent scholarship in this area).  Once again Ronnie focuses on art, not just message, suggesting that “A Man’s a man for a’ that” is better known than, say, “Epistle to Davie” or “The Twa Dogs,” because it is more direct, not because it shows any greater poetic skill: “I am not arguing that [“A man’s a man”] is a bad song, only an overestimated one” (ibid., p. 46). This is followed by a subtle revisionist and very positive reading of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” often maligned by mid-20^th century critics, but here recast, through contrast with Fergusson’s “Farmer’s Ingle,” as a revolutionary poem giving dignity to the cotter’s life-style (pp. 47-49). That reading, in turn, casts new light on the anarchic world of “The Jolly Beggars,” so that in all three poems, while Burns “with the Scotsman’s known canniness, … preached subtly,” he was asserting a manly and intransigent independence that was revolutionary (p. 52). Written in the aftermath of the first, unsuccessful devolution referendum in 1979, the third section of the essay compares three very different Burns’s poems on national freedom (“Scots, wha hae,” the “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots,” and “A Parcel of Rogues”), pointing to parallels between Burns’s treatment of Wallace, Mary, the Jacobites, and the Union of 1707 and suggesting a similar survival of self-respect and identity in the face of historical change.

It is worth noting that in treating Burns’s poems on religious freedom Ronnie makes reference or comparison, not to John Knox or the Shorter Catechism, but to the Renaissance playwright John Webster, the 17^th-century epic poet John Milton, the early 18^th century Anglo-Scot James Thomson and his pro-Union  masque Alfred, and the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy (Jack, “Freedom,” pp. 44-45). It is difficult, perhaps, to remember how restricted Scottish criticism, especially Burns criticism, had sometimes been.  Murray Pittock has shared an anecdote about Ronnie once giving an Immortal Memory in the West of Scotland, where he compared Burns to  Fergusson, Burns’s “elder brother I’ the Muse,” surely no great stretch, and being reproved afterwards by the chairman for having introduced an Edinburgh writer. Certainly, this broader, comparative approach became the great emphasis in Ronnie’s subsequent writing about Burns.  It can be seen, for instance, in a talk he gave at Ken Simpson’s Strathclyde conference, somewhat mischievously titled “Burns as Sassenach Poet” ((Jack, in Burns Now, 1994).  The essay is about the intertwining of Scots and English poetry, discussing in detail how much Burns learned from and respected Alexander Pope and how much Wordsworth learned from and respected Burns. He had written more specifically on the Wordsworth-Burns connection the previous year, but for a locally-published festschrift that had very limited distribution (Jack, “From Doon to Derwent”). In the Strathclyde essay, Ronnie argues that “Honest comparative criticism involves assessing similarities as well as differences” (p. 156) and his focus is not on the usual facts and examples about reading and borrowings but on what the poetic similarities can illuminate about Burns’s poetry. He argues indeed that “The reader … who reads only Scottish poets and so ignores Pope and Wordsworth will, I fear, achieve an inadequate view both of Burns and of his contribution to literature within Britain” (p. 164). It is perhaps the only address ever to a Burns conference that culminated by reading aloud, in its entirety, Wordsworth’s poem “The Solitary Reaper.”  Once again Ronnie’s general stance anticipates that of subsequent Burns researchers, in this instance in its openness to exploring the wider, non-Scottish range of Burns’s literary connections.

Soon afterwards, Ronnie carried this general insight about Burns into two other conference addresses, both for the Burns bicentenary in 1996. In these, he wrote squarely from the unimpeachable vantage point of his own expertise in earlier Scots literature.  For the South Carolina conference, he wrote on Burns and the Makars (Dunbar, Henryson, and others), tracing through an extraordinary variety of Burns poems the use of specific earlier verse forms and literary modes, including the beast fable, the verse debate or dialogue poem, the flyting or verse attack, allegory, and finally the carnivalesque or peasant brawl (Jack, “Makars”). But he presents these specific connections in terms of a general assessment of literary culture in Burns’s Ayrshire:
  

Was Burns influenced by the Makars? The answer definitely has to be yes.… His own immediate familiarity with fifteenth-century tradition seems to have been limited, filtered through the eyes of subsequent generations [but] Burns was undoubtedly learned, and he hides his learning just as well as Henryson does…. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, things had moved more slowy in the Scottish countryside than they had in the cities.  Traditional culture was hallowed and retained both in folk ritual and in literate social history. … the preservation of the Makars’ tradition in Scottish folk culture and in the verse of his learned predecessors resulted in unique adaptations of medieval language, modes and themes to eighteenth-century problems (Jack, “Makars,” pp. 106-107).

For the Strathclyde bicentenary conference, he focused on Burns’s attitudes to Renaissance Scottish writing, specifically Alexander Montgomerie and the Italian-influenced sonneteers known as the Castalian Band. T.F. Henderson, Henley’s coeditor on the Centenary Burns, had drawn a strong contrast between the artificiality of Castalian rhetoric and the authenticity of Scots vernacular poetry, a contrast Burns had used himself in the bard section of The Jolly Beggars, but one which Ronnie neatly dismantles, showing the artful complexity of Burns’s own writing (Jack, in Love and Liberty).  He concludes that, far from Burns representing a break with the high poetic tradition, both the Renaissance poets and Burns were, at their best, “using the full rhetorical variety of the vernacular to explore, from different viewpoints, for different audiences in different times, the mysteries and miseries of existence for all of us, high and low, favoured and rejected” (ibid.).

Ronnie’s return to these earlier authors, and to Burns’s literary connections in the Scottish and wider European context, was doubtless encouraged by his involvement with one of the major new interdisciplinary Scottish research projects of the 1990s, BOSLIT, or the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation. As Burns’s correspondent Alexander Fraser Tytler had recognized in the 1790s, the art of translation focuses attention on the language and style of a poet, in much the same way as the rhetorical critical method in which Ronnie had been trained, and Ronnie’s report on the BOSLIT project, for Murray Pittock’s collection Robert Burns and Global Culture (2011) brings out, not just the amount and variety of Burns translation but also, more briefly, its critical interest.

In stressing the international literary context of Burns and Scottish poetry, Ronnie was consciously countering trends in the Scottish university curriculum in the 1990s, when  expanded opportunities to specialize in Scottish literature, especially modern Scottish literature,  were inevitably squeezing out much of the traditional literary curriculum that had underpinned his own critical understanding.  In the earlier Strathclyde conferences, he started his talk with rhetorically-exaggerated exasperation at “students who look to nationality first and literary quality second or never,” and at “those who have welcomed additional Scottish courses in the negative spirit of ‘Thank God, I don’t need to do Shakespeare now’” (Jack, in Burns Now, pp. 150, 13). In 1996, he mocked Scottish critics who live “in a politically correct Never-Never Land” and “allow nationalist wish-fulfilment in retrospective oversimplification to obscure the essentially literary dimension” of poetry (Jack, Love and Liberty, p. 117).  Some of his audience were bewildered or affronted that an erstwhile champion of Scottish literary studies seemed to have switched sides. Ross Roy, who was present at one of the talks, told me when he got back home that Ronnie’s polemic had provoked quite hostile audience reaction. Ronnie, I think, saw his dramatically-presented comments as flytings, corrective debating moves, upsetting what he saw as the creeping complacency of narrower or less-agile Scottish literature specialists.  Certainly the academic folk-memory of the flytings should not be allowed to obscure the long-term value of Ronnie’s substantive discussions about Burns’s literary connections.

One of the last major essays that Ronnie wrote about Burns avoids such controversy and is also one of the most generally accessible short discussions of Burns’s poetic art by any recent critic. This was his contribution to the festschrift for Ross Roy, where he drew on his own long experience as a performer to explore why Burns’s work is so effective dramatically when it is recited or read aloud (Jack, in Robert Burns & Friends). As always, Ronnie started from the idea that Burns’s poetry was essentially oral, but that the voice of the poems was a created voice, a persona, not to be easily identified with Burns himself.  The essay starts by contrasting two short lyrics. The first, “O, my luve’s like a red, red, rose,” is in a voice of “a young amorous male,” much like Burns himself, and so apparently the sincere, authentic authorial voice, yet its imagery is all borrowed and traditional, and its much of its emotional power comes from a classical rhetorical device, anaphora, or structural repetition. The other “John Anderson, my Jo,” assumes a voice “not even remotely” Burns’s own. Ronnie describes it as the voice of “an aged, faithful married woman who sings to her equally ancient and faithful partner”: as Ronnie comments, “None of the states imagined here were, or could be, remotely Burns’s” (ibid. p. 39-40). Indeed, he suggests that Burns’s rewriting of “John Anderson” from the older bawdy version to the one he made famous was less a bowdlerization than a bravura example of Burns showing how the skillful poet could argue both sides of a question, as in medieval or Renaissance debate. This basic insight, about the dramatic artfulness of Burns’s lyrics, is then applied to poems more frequently read in terms of their content, “Scots wha hae,” masculine, martial, and heroic, and “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots,” “romantic and spiritual praise for a tragic queen.” In the latter poem, pointing out that the seasonal imagery in the first six stanzas are from spring, as contrast to Mary’s imprisonment, while in the seventh Mary looks forward to winter:

O! soon, to me, may summer-suns

Nae mair light up the morn!

Nae mair, to me, the autumn winds

Wave o’er the yellow corn!

And in the narrow house o’ death

Let winter round me rave;

And the next flowers that deck the spring,

Bloom on my peaceful grave (ll. 49-55; Kinsley II; 547).

“This, for me,” commented Ronnie, “is one of the most touching stanzas Burns ever wrote” (ibid. p. 42). He had, he wrote,” no quarrel with the diagnosis” that the poem was “undeniably sentimental,”  because “the orator-poet arouses pity or joy,” not through realism, but “through idealistically-constructed oppositions between good and evil.” Burns, he suggests, again slightly mischievously, “anticipates the methods of Dickens” (ibid., pp. 42-43).  

The most striking part of the essay, however, is Ronnie’s extended analysis of Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter.” He starts from the way in which the poem mixes together Burns’s usual poetic modes, the lyric and dramatic, with the rather different mode of folk narrative, and he distinguishes clearly between the voices within the poem (notably Tam and Kate), the voice of the ostensibly moralistic narrator, itself channeling earlier folk narrators, and the elusive voice of Burns himself, not be identified with any of the others. Burns, he writes,
 

relinquishes responsibility to a narrator who becomes one of the most powerful characters in the story. He it is who guides the reader’s reaction to events. An attempt to read the poem in consistent biographical terms is, therefore, a truly hopeless activity.  It is after all the representation of a drunken man’s vision of supernatural events as first narrated in folk takes, and then re-transmitted by a self-evidently bemused narrator who “contains multitudes” and is especially undecided when it comes to witches! (ibid., p. 45).

Ronnie follows this rather disorienting insight by providing a neat, almost schoolmasterly,  outline of the tale’s dramatic structure, a five-act sequence, with Burns providing clear pointers for the reader or performer, even as the poet artfully conceals himself from view.  Burns attracts biographers, Ronnie suggests in closing, “because his life was, in itself, dramatic,” but the ways in which Burns “conceals his already variable voice… while aiding the universality of his general appeal,” should warn critics against interpreting Burns’s poetry “on its own histrionic terms” (ibid. p. 46).  It is a remarkable final statement of Ronnie’s continuing fascination with Burns, as well as of the insights that led him to resist more simplistic readings.

This survey is, of course, a very impersonal retrospect on Ronnie’s contribution to the understanding of Burns.  I was a colleague of Ronnie’s at Edinburgh in the early 1970s, and we weren’t that far apart in age, but when I arrived he was already well-launched as an academic, PhD in hand, married to Kirsty, and living outside Edinburgh, while I was an unmarried temporary lecturer with a mere MA from one of the smallest English universities, living in draughty rented rooms in the New Town. Nor, since we taught in different fields, did our work bring us much together. Ironically I got to know him better, and understand better his approach to Burns’s poetry, when he visited South Carolina, for conferences in 1996 and 2009, and especially when he came as Roy Fellow in 2003. Because I had been away from Edinburgh for so much of his career, I never got wholly used to the idea that Ronnie had metamorphosed into Prof. R.D.S. Jack, MA, PhD, DLitt, FRSE, FEA, but in some ways it never really changed him.  Ross Roy, who had known Ronnie’s work from his earliest articles in the 1960s, always had the highest respect for him as a scholar, and we both much enjoyed and appreciated his visits and his contributions to the conferences. I hope there will be, in due course, other, more personal tributes, from colleagues, students, and friends, as well as tributes to his many other accomplishments, both in scholarship and for the Edinburgh community. But I hope also that this account will help Ronnie’s distinctive contributions to Robert Burns studies continue to be recognized and understood by future Burnsians. 

References

Brief notice in Edinburgh Evening News (December 16, 2016); also in The Scotsman (Edinburgh) and The Herald (Glasgow).

BOSLIT: Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (National Library of Scotland): http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/boslit

Carpenter, Sarah, and Sarah M. Dunnigan, eds., “Joyous Sweit Imaginatioun”: Essays on Scottish Literature in Honour of R.D.S. Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 

--Includes bibliography of Professor Jack’s published writings.

“Jack, Ronald Dyce Sadler,” in International Who’s Who of Authors and Writers, 19^th Edition (London and New York: Europa Publications, 2003), p. 270.

Jack, R.D.S., The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), pp. 159-164.

__________, and Andrew Noble, eds., The Art of Robert Burns. London (London: Vision; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982).

__________, “Burns and Bawdy,” in The Art of Robert Burns, pp. 98-126; also available as Robert Burns Lives!, ed. Frank R. Shaw, 116 (2011):

http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/burns_lives116.htm

__________, “Robert Burns and the Idea of Freedom,” Scotia, 6 (1982): 41-59.

__________, “The Range of Robert Burns' Satires,” in Scholastic Midwifery: Studien zum Satirischen in der englischen Literatur 1600-1800: Festschrift für Dietrich Rolle zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Jan Eden Peters and Thomas Michael Stein (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1989), pp. 185-194. 

___________, “From Doon to Derwent: Burns and Wordsworth,” in The Arts in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Basil Skinner, ed. Murdo MacDonald (Edinburgh: Quadriga, 1993), pp. 69-84.

___________, “Burns as Sassenach Poet,” In Burns Now, ed. Kenneth Simpson (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1994), pp. 150-166. 

____________, “‘Castalia's Stank’: Burns and Rhetoric,” in Love and Liberty: Robert Burns: A Bicentenary Celebration, ed. Kenneth Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1997), pp. 111-118. .

____________, “Which Vernacular Revival? Burns and the Makars,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 30 (1998): 9-17.

_____________, “‘In ane uther leid’: Reviewing Scottish Literature's Linguistic Boundaries,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 35-36 (2007 [2008]): 164–183:

 http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol35/iss1/14/

____________, “Translating Burns: the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives,” in Robert Burns and Global Culture, ed. Murray Pittock (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011), pp. 156-171.

___________, “Robert Burns as Dramatic Poet,” in Robert Burns & Friends: Essays by W. Ormiston Roy Fellows Presented to G. Ross Roy, ed. Scott and Simpson (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Libraries, 2012), pp. 38-46; also as Studies In Scottish Literature 37, no. 1 (2013): 38-46: http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol37/iss1/5/

____________, “”’Where Stand we Now/”: A Renaissance View,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 38 (2012): 51-70: http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol38/iss1/12/

Kinsley, James, ed., Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

Low, Donald A., review of The Art of Robert Burns, Review of English Studies, 35 (November 1984):556.

[Mackay, James], review of The Art of Robert Burns, Burns Chronicle, 4th ser., 9 (1984), 14-15.

Murison, David, review of The Art of Robert Burns, Notes & Queries, 31:1 (March 1984): 126-127.

Wojtas, Olga, ”Star Lecturer,” Times Higher Education Supplement (February 6, 1998): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/star-lecturer/105801.article.

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