Patrick Greig Scott
University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)
FT-62054-14
Summer Stipends
Research Programs
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[Grant products][Media coverage]
Totals:
$6,000 (approved)
$6,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
8/1/2014 – 9/30/2014
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John Wilson, Robert Burns, and Printing in 18th-Century Ayrshire, Scotland
This proposal is for the first book-length study of the 18th century Scottish printer, John Wilson (17**-1820) of Kilmarnock and later Ayr, best known for Robert Burns's first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). The project examines the full range of books printed over a forty-year career by Wilson and his brother Peter, with emphasis on Kilmarnock publications, as evidence about cultural continuities in late 18th-century small-town and provincial Scotland, the nature and uneven pace of cultural change away from the major Scottish Enlightenment publishing centres, and the relation of such local printer-booksellers to their influential (and better-studied) contemporaries in Edinburgh and London. A final chapter reconsiders Burns's writing in the context of this publishing ethnography.
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