Robert Burns and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Sensitive Hearts, Big Mouths

Yann Tholoniat (1)

1 IDEA - Interdisciplinarité dans les Etudes Anglophones - Interdisciplinarity in English Studies

Burns’s legend still has it that he was a “heaven-taught ploughman”, as Henry Mackenzie put it, although in recent years, and during conferences in 2009, the year of his 250th birth anniversary, scholars have tried to show the range of the Scottish Bard’s encyclopaedic knowledge. Taking the term “Encyclopaedia” in its historic dimension, this article shall focus on Burns’s elective affinity with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A musician, a lover of nature and a figurehead of the age of sensibility, an opponent of absolute monarchy, and as such an outspoken personality (what Michel Foucault would call a parresiast), prone to self-dramatising, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher in which Burns found much to identify with and to draw upon to build his own poetic persona.

Mots clés: Interdisciplinarité; Etudes Anglophones; Civilisations anglo-saxonnes; Littératures anglophones; Etudes postcoloniales

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Littératures; Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène

Yann Tholoniat. Robert Burns and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Sensitive Hearts, Big Mouths. Thomas Constantinesco; Sophie Laniel-Musitelli. Romanticism and the Philosophical Tradition, Presses universitaires de Nancy - Editions Universitaires de Lorraine, pp.167-183 2015, Romanticism and the Philosophical Tradition, 978-2-8143-0231-0. ⟨hal-01523983⟩