This volume includes a selection of Scottish writing from one of its most innovative periods, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It ranges across literary genres from the controversial 'translations' of James Macpherson's Ossian poems to the prose polemic of Thomas Carlyle. It includes a wide selection from the poetry of Robert Burns and the short fiction of James Hogg, and the complete texts of Joanna Baillie's play De Monfort, Walter Scott's narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and John Galt's novel Annals of the Parish. Footnotes elucidate historical and other references, and Scots words are fully glossed. The introduction places these texts in the dynamic historical context in which this extraordinary literary flourishing occurred. Robert Irvine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of books on Tobias Smollett, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen.
