The Works of Robert Fergusson will transform academic and popular perception of this influential and often misrepresented Scottish poet of the mid-eighteenth century. It offers the first full, consistent and transparently edited textual edition of Fergusson’s works alongside extensive annotations, collation of textual variants, explanatory notes and an expanded Scots glossary. The collected works are contracted by Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2026.

Fergusson’s textual legacy has been repeatedly adulterated since his death, and editors have altered the poet’s carefully-presented texts, language and presentation. The Works of Robert Fergusson will strip away these interventions to present Fergusson’s entire corpus, including manuscript texts which have not yet been incorporated into his known canon, offering the first reliable edition of Fergusson’s works for a twenty-first century academic and popular audience.

The Works of Robert Fergusson will be the first to employ first printings of his works as copytext, minimising textual corruption and restoring their immediate contexts and publications in the Scottish periodical press. Fergusson is unusual in that the first printing of the vast majority of his poems is in the periodical press. He becomes unofficial house poet of Walter Ruddiman’s popular periodical, The Weekly Magazine, publishing there on an almost weekly basis between early 1771 and late 1773. The Works of Robert Fergusson is also the first edition to provide full collation of variants between manuscript and multiple print sources, tracing the evolution of his texts from first printing to collection in the only edition published in his lifetime, Poems (1773).