The Prose of Allan Ramsay

Transforming academic and popular understanding of this pivotal but, until now, largely under-researched literary figure, this volume offers the first full and consistent edition of Allan Ramsay’s prose. The volume contains all extant prose writings, from both manuscript and print sources. As well as all known letters, the volume includes prefaces, dedications and advertisements for Ramsay’s major collections. It also contains Ramsay’s anonymously-published Some Few Hints in Defence of Dramatical Entertainments, the full text of his influential collection of Scots Proverbs and significant prose from manuscript sources, including Ramsay’s account of Edinburgh’s Porteous Riots in April 1736 and notes on contemporary plays. In these works, we see Ramsay’s consistent and steadfast commitment to preserving Scottish literary culture, and gain a privileged insight into Ramsay’s personality, his priorities, ambitions and core beliefs.

Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical Press at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in eighteenth-century Scots language poetry and the history of the periodical press in Scotland, as well as in eighteenth-century club culture. Brown is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012) and co-editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015), and she has published widely on eighteenth-century Scottish literature and journalism. In the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay series, Brown is editor of a two-volume edition of Ramsay’s Poems (2023), and she is co-editor of the Oxford University Press edition of Robert Burns’s Correspondence.

Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow. He specialises in print culture, textual editing, and memory studies across a range of Scottish subjects and writers. Lamont is author of The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow (2021), co-editor of The Scottish Rebellion: Insurrection 1820 (2022), and co-editor of Allan Ramsay’s Future: Studies in Scottish Literature (2020). He has published on Scottish literature, bibliography, and memory studies, and he is co-editor of the Oxford University Press edition of Robert Burns’s Correspondence.