ANDREW GIBSON MEMORIAL LECTURE ‘Thrice famous Robert Fergusson’: Ulster’s Other Rabbie

Ulster’s Romantic period literary links with Scotland are perhaps best known through the first generation of ‘weaver poets’ and their poetic correspondence with Robert Burns.

In this year’s Andrew Gibson Memorial Lecture, Dr Jennifer Orr examines the poetic influence of the Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson (Burns’s ‘elder brother in the Muse’) on the work of James Orr of Ballycarry and Samuel Thomson of Templepatrick. Thomson’s successful volumes Poems (1793) and New Poems on a Variety of Different Subjects, Partly in the Scottish Dialect (1799) show a particular affinity with Fergussonian wit, satire, and love of rural scenes. His innovative 1799 volume New Poems, completed in the traumatic aftermath of the Irish Rising of 1798, has often been read as a retreat into Fergussonian ‘hame content’: political quietism and homosocial fraternity, underpinned by subtly-coded messages of political resistance.

Through adaptations of, and allusions to, Fergusson, this lecture examines the poets’ contributions to ‘four nations’ romanticism through what Murray Pittock has described as the ‘decolonisation of genre’, the development of the Scottish models for an Ulster and Irish context, and savage satirical humour which attempts to resist appropriation into Great Britain at the point of 1800 Act of Union.

FREE to attend.