Kirsteen McCue – författare

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 provides access to the relevant material in the various musical collections to which Hogg refers in his 1831 head notes, thus allowing twenty-first century readers 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.

James Hogg’s Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd appeared in 1831 and presented his public with ‘a pocket volume’ of his best and most popular songs. It contains 113 songs spanning the whole of Hogg’s career as shepherd and professional writer, from his ‘first’ song, ‘Donald MacDonald’, created around 1803, to songs that had only just appeared in print.This volume is the first scholarly edition of the collection since its original appearance. It includes an Introduction, giving an account of the importance to Hogg of songs and singing across his creative life and detailed notes to each of the songs Hogg presents. The volume is intended to be used alongside James Hogg’s Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs which contains musical copies of the songs, taken directly from the collections to which Hogg refers in Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd. As such it provides the full textual and musical contexts of these songs as Hogg’s public would have known and enjoyed them.

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 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.

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.

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.