Iconic Burns

Abstract

Abstract In the twenty-first century, Robert Burns has been granted a notable afterlife as a visual icon—evolving and mutating into new forms and in new guises. This essay examines how early portraits of Burns have become the visual source material and pattern for a reproducible cultural sign that says Robert Burns. Approaching Burns from a cultural studies perspective, it reveals how this long-established cultural icon is undergoing a twenty-first-century makeover in spheres such as graphic design, fashion and art, events and tourism, commodities and advertising, museum display, and social media. These new visual interpretations inform the analysis of Burns’s complex symbolic role in which a dynamic adaptive process of both continuity and change contribute to his endurance and relevance. A detailed examination of a number of key examples traces the reworkings and uses of his image in a range of contexts in order to consider how the processes of visual adaptation and appropriation may serve to reinforce, renew, or subvert his cultural status and meanings.