Embodied Communities: Commemorating Robert Burns, 1859

Abstract

The centenary celebrations of Robert Burns on January 25, 1859, took the form of more than eight hundred meetings across the English-speaking world at which participants celebrated both the memory of the poet and, especially through the use of the telegraph, their own present-day inter-connectedness. This article situates this extraordinary event within the larger context of the nineteenth-century culture of artistic commemorations and uses the case to critically reexamine the view of literature's role in nation building that has been generally accepted since Anderson's influential Imagined Communities (1983).