Dooble tongue

the long version

"Dooble Tongue is an uncommon act of scholarship and, unusually for scholarship, difficult to summarize: at once an imaginative meditation on Robert Burns, Scottish poetry, and song, and a book that engages and contests - more boldly and with greater good humor than most - the customary assumptions and practices of literary criticism." "The subject, to speak generally, is the cultural politics of poetic discourse. The focus throughout is on language, specifically the Scots language in its long-vexed relationship to English, more broadly vernacular literature in relation to culturally elite literary (and critical) modes. The method tends heavily toward close reading: theoretically informed and conceptually evocative, Dooble Tongue is nevertheless primarily concerned with texts, poems, and songs."--Jacket.