Tam o' Shanter and Aesthetic Cultural Nationalism

Drawing on recent debates about Burns and Scottish Romanticism, particularly comments by Murray Pittock, Nigel Leask, and Ian Duncan, discusses the pivotal scene in Robert Burns's poem "Tam o' Shanter," in which Tam's vision of the witches' carnival is framed by the window of Alloway Kirk, and argues that this can be read as a framing and aestheticization not only of folk heritage, but of a national self-image, a recalibration of nationhood