Burns & Scott: Builders of the Scottish Nation

Synopsis:  Robert Burns and Walter Scott operate similarly brilliant imaginative agendas with Scotland's past. They pay attention to and promote that history via their work in ways that broadcast enduring ideas of Scotland to the wider world. Burns sometimes receives credit, and Scott its opposite - largely for political reasons - for their coinages of the nation. Both of these great Romantic writers, however, have been critiqued, most especially during the twentieth century for not being 'modern' enough. In poetry, fiction and song, however, Burns and Scott deal in sophisticated, sensitive ways with the changes and movement of Scottish history, with psychology and human sentiment that have lasting contemporary resonances. Professional Burns and Scott criticism have grasped their first rate literary and cultural significance, but it remains to be seen if a wider popular apprehension can one day do the same.