Cosponsored Event

Allan Ramsay and Augustan Edinburgh

Date/Time
Thursday, February 25, 2021
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm

–Taylor Walle (Washington and Lee University)

Southern California Eighteenth-Century Group Talks

The Southern California Eighteenth-Century Group meets quarterly to discuss literary, historical, and cultural matters from 1660 to the early nineteenth century. Drawing on the vibrant eighteenth-century community in Los Angeles, the group invites a scholar who is visiting the Huntington or the Clark Library, or a faculty member from a local institution, to present a pre-circulated paper followed by a lively in-depth exchange.

“Allan Ramsay and Augustan Edinburgh” looks at the Scots dialect poetry of Allan Ramsay, a so-called “vernacular” poet who is primarily remembered as the predecessor of Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. Tracing the affinities between Ramsay and his English peers, the chapter argues that much of Ramsay’s dialect poetry defies his reputation as a rude and rustic poet, participating in a larger conversation about post-Union Britain and interpolating the Scots language into his vision of Britishness.

Taylor Walle is an assistant professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA. Her book project, “Vulgar Recitations: Speech and the Bid for Authority in British Literature, 1707–1820,” argues that, despite increasing reliance on visual and textual evidence in the period, speech and orality remained crucial to eighteenth-century notions of understanding.

For more information about these talks, or to subscribe to the Southern California Eighteenth-Century Group email list, contact contactscecg@gmail.com­­­