This volume of essays about the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) pays tribute to the distinguished Burns scholar Professor G. Ross Roy. Subjects covered include writers who influenced Burns; aspects of Burns's own writing, friends and contemporaries; and Burns's influence on later writers. The volume also includes essays on Ross Roy's own accomplishments and on the Burns collection he built (now at the University of South Carolina), together with a checklist of his published writings.

This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literati laid the foundations for developments in imaginative writing in Scotland and further afield. In doing so, it provide a context for the widespread revaluation of the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the part that culture played in the project of Enlightenment.