This collection includes the first critical editions of both Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands, and Elizabeth Isabella Spence's Letters from the North Highlands (1816), a work that, while influenced by Grant's Letters, attempted to move the genre of the Scottish travelogue in new directions. Read together, these volumes offer complementary views of Scottish Highland life at a time of major historical transition: Grant was offering outsiders her perspective as a long-time resident of the region, while Spence was, unapologetically, writing as a tourist. The Highlands were central to Romantic-era debates on subjects ranging from landscape and aesthetics to national identities, and, as this collection demonstrates, women were making significant contributions to those debates. The four volume set, edited by Kirsteen McCue and Pam Perkins, is accompanied by new editorial material including a new general introduction and headnotes to each work.

Between 1792 and his untimely death in 1796, Robert Burns engaged in a detailed correspondence with Edinburgh civil servant and song editor, George Thomson (1757-1851). Thomson had approached him with a commission to provide song texts initially for a large collection of Scottish National airs or tunes. This fascinating and productive relationship has received little attention over the past two hundred years, with most editions of Burns's songs removing them from this original context. Thomson's role in editing Burns's texts, and in the 'branding' of Burns, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, has also received little detailed analysis. This new edition of Burns's songs for Thomson is the first to fully explore the nature of this collaboration, explaining the context for Thomson's masterplan and articulating clearly how Burns engaged, at all levels, with this project. It presents over 170 of Burns's songs as they appeared across Thomson's collections of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish airs for the first time since their original publications. Presenting both texts and music, it is the only time Burns's songs for Thomson's Select Collections have been examined and presented as a body of work. Thomson's project, aimed at the growing middle classes and at performance in the drawing room and on the concert platform, presented Burns's songs amongst those by other poets of the period, including Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie, and Lord Byron. Moreover, Burns's songs were set to national airs with musical arrangements by eminent contemporary European composers including Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. Each song in this new edition appears with detailed explanatory notes on this creative context, tracking the poet's and editor's conversations about songs and tunes, the changes made by Thomson to Burns's songs, and giving essential information about both the airs and their musical settings. There is a detailed account of Thomson's complicated bibliography and his 1805 'Glossary of the Scottish words' is included as an appendix, alongside a list of songs recommended by Burns but never published by Thomson.

This volume contains the first volume of Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands.

This volume contains Elizabeth Isabella Spence's Letters from the North Highlands, one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands (1816), a work that, while influenced by Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), attempted to move the genre of the Scottish travelogue in new directions.

This volume contains the second volume of Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands. It is part of a four volume set, edited by Kirsteen McCue and Pam Perkins, which is accompanied by new editorial material including a new general introduction and headnotes to each work.

This volume contains the third volume of Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands.

The proposed Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs volume provides access to the relevant material in the various musical collections to which Hogg refers in his 1831 head notes, thus allowing the new readers of the 21st century to see in facsimile what Hogg himself saw. This procedure provides a broader context - in literary and musical terms - in which to enhance our understanding of the reception of Hogg's songs during his lifetime.

First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown's seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet. Originally commissioned by his publisher as an introduction to the Orkney Islands, Brown approached the writing from a unique perspective and went on to produce a rich fusion of ballad, folk tale, short story, drama and environmental writing. The book, written at an early stage in the author's career, explores themes that appear in his later work and was a landmark in Brown's development as a writer. Above all, it is a celebration of Orkney's people, language and history. This edition reproduces Sylvia Wishart's beautiful illustrations, commissioned for the original hardback. Made available again for the first time in over 40 years, this new edition sits alongside Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain as an important precursor of environmental writing by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Malachy Tallack and, most recently, Amy Liptrot.

Hogg's involvement with song collecting and writing spans the whole of his career, from the early 1800s until the early 1830s, and examples are found across all genres of his work - fiction, drama, poetry and in a number of important musical publications. His 1831 collection entitled Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd came about as an attempt to better his difficult financial situation, and is of particular interest and significance. It was published towards the end of his career, and it provides his own retrospective presentation of his lifetime achievement as a song-writer. This critical edition of Hogg's volume makes his songs accessible for the first time. The layout mirrors the original volume which contained 'head notes' by Hogg himself. These notes provide a great deal of factual, biographical and anecdotal information which proves vitally important to our understanding of the development of his role as a song writer and collector. Alongside the text of Songs from 1831, this edition will contain an introduction discussing Hogg's role as a song writer and collector and a detailed account of the creation of the original manuscript.