The Settler Colonial Cotter: Situating ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ in Post-Revolutionary America

This article examines the afterlives of Robert Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ in the United States of America over the long nineteenth century. It examines three ‘American cots’: the two poems, Gavin Turnbull's ‘The Cottage’ (1790) and John Greenleaf Whittier's ‘Snow-bound’ (1866); plus the reconstructed Burns’s cottage erected in Atlanta (1910). It argues that through them we can trace both the USA’s first century of self-fashioning and the more global process of rooting anglophone settler identity.