“The West Winds”: Burns and American Cultural Memory, c.1800–1866

Abstract

This chapter seeks to better define what variously constituted public “memories” of Burns in the nineteenth-century USA by using theoretical frameworks derived from memory studies. Framed by Jan Assmann’s assertion that cultural memory depends upon objectified “institutions of preservation” (relics, books, anniversaries, statues and several other modes of objectification), the chapter outlines the various processes by which Burns was remembered and remediated. Discussion spans across a variety of material and memorial culture, ranging from the establishment of the first American “Burns Clubs” to the transatlantic vogue for erecting statues in the poet’s honour. Widely contrasting American memories are discussed, with particular reference to how groups as divergent as Northern abolitionists and the Ku Klux Klan simultaneously used the poet’s works to bolster group identity in the years straddling the American Civil War. The chapter closes by addressing the complex issue of whether these different modes of remembrance might legitimately be grouped together and viewed as instances of “national” American remembrance.