| FT-62054-14 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Patrick Greig Scott | John Wilson, Robert Burns, and Printing in 18th-Century Ayrshire, Scotland | 8/1/2014 - 9/30/2014 | $6,000.00 | Patrick | Greig | Scott | | | | University of South Carolina | Columbia | SC | 29208-0001 | USA | 2014 | Cultural History | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 |
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. |