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.

This volume of Studies in Scottish Literature, with essays about Robert Burns, his contemporaries, and his influence, was originally issued separately as a festschrift for presentation on his 88th birthday to Prof. G. Ross Roy (1924-2013), founder and for nearly fifty years editor of the series. The distinguished list of contributors to the volume have all been former W. Ormiston Roy Visiting Fellows at the University of South Carolina, home of the G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns & Scottish Poetry. Following Professor Roy's death, the volume is being reissued as Studies in Scottish Literature 37, in place of the volume he had himself projected for that volume number.

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.