Robert Burns & Friends: Essays by W. Ormiston Roy Fellows presented to G. Ross Roy ed. by Patrick Scott and Kenneth Simpson (review)

Robert Burns & Friends is a collection of fourteen essays which examines the poetry, song, lifetime and reception of the Scottish National Bard. The volume was published as a tribute to the distinguished scholar and collector of Robert Burns and Scottish literature, the late Professor G. Ross Roy (1924-2013), shortly before his death on 19 February this year.

The volume begins with an eloquent account of G. Ross Roy's impressive career by Kenneth Simpson. Particular attention is paid to Ross Roy's passion for Scottish literature, and to the vital part that he played in promoting scholarship and publication in the field via his forty-five year editorship of Studies in Scottish Literature. Mention is also made of the W. Ormiston Roy Memorial Visiting Research Fellowship for the study of Robert Burns and Scottish Poetry. Established by Ross Roy and his wife Lucie in 1990, the W. Ormiston Roy Fellowship has afforded recent generations of scholars the opportunity to work with the extensive G. Ross Roy collection of manuscripts and rare books, now held at the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections library, University of South Carolina. It is therefore fitting that the authors of essays included in this volume have each benefited from access to this rare and precious collection as W. Ormiston Roy Fellows themselves.

Thomas Keith's contribution, 'A Passion for Scholarship and Collecting: The G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns and Scottish Literature', addresses another aspect of Ross Roy's legacy. Keith successfully captures the good-humoured determination with which G. Ross Roy built his collection of Burnsiana and Scottish literature into one of the most impressive in the world, and the largest outside of the United Kingdom. The volume concludes with a useful and extensive bibliographical account of Ross Roy's scholarship compiled by Patrick Scott, and so the reader can be left in no doubt of the impact of his work upon Scottish literary research.

In addition to honouring the life and work of G. Ross Roy, the remaining papers in this volume honour the life and works of one of his favourite poets, Robert Burns, by presenting a broad-ranging interpretation of the bard's achievements as a poet and song-writer/collector, as well as his legacy and reception. Essays by Gerard Carruthers and Corey Andrews offer interpretations of key texts from Burns's canon. In '"Tongues Turn'd Inside Out": The Reception of "Tam o' Shanter"', Carruthers considers the diffculties faced by editors throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they grappled with the textual complexity of Burns's most well-known poem. Carruthers argues that this complexity is the point: 'Tam o' Shanter' is Burns's comment on 'human uncertainty' (56). Andrews's essay, 'Footnoted Folklore: Robert Burns's "Halloween"', offers an extensive examination of Burns's lesser-known representation of Scottish folk tradition and the supernatural, drawing our attention to the importance of poem's sophisticated paratext (36).

Several essays focus on Burns's writing in different genres. Valentina Bold writes of Burns's bawdy song and verse published in the privately printed volume, The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799), and touches upon the collection's complex publishing history. Kenneth Simpson accurately identifies the multiple voices and self-images that Burns projects across his extensive correspondence in '"Epistolary Performances": Burns and the arts of the letter', while Fred Freeman discusses Burns's contribution to Scottish folksong, emphasising that Burns 'recreated' the song tradition in the eighteenth century, and calling for a renewed investment in the Scottish song tradition. In a more focused study, Kirsteen McCue considers the various melodies to which Burns's famed love song, 'O my luve's like a red, red rose', has been set, and posits that as both the lyrics and music are rooted in tradition, Burns's...