James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author

Responding to the resurgence of interest in the Scottish working-class writer James Hogg, Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson offer the first edited collection devoted to an examination of the critical implications of his writings and their position in the Edinburgh and London literary marketplaces. Writing during a particularly complex time in Scottish literary history, Hogg, a working shepherd for much of his life, is seen to challenge many of the aesthetic conventions adopted by his contemporaries and to anticipate many of the concerns voiced in discussions of literature in recent years. While the essays privilege Hogg's primary texts and read them closely in their immediate cultural context, the volume's contributors also introduce relevant research on oral culture, nationalism, transnationalism, intertextuality, class, colonialism, empire, psychology, and aesthetics where they serve to illuminate Hogg's literary ingenuity as a working-class writer in Romantic Scotland.

Contents: Preface; Scottish romanticism and the working class author: an introduction, Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson; Hogg and Scott's 'first meeting' and the politics of literary friendship, Peter Garside; National discourse or discord? Transformations of The Family Legend by Baillie, Scott and Hogg, Meiko O'Halloran; Fanaticism and enlightenment in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Ian Duncan; Robert Wringhim's solitude, Gillian Hughes; The labourer and literary tradition: James Hogg's early reading and its impact on him as a writer, H.B. de Groot; James Hogg and the authority of tradition, Suzanne Gilbert; James Hogg: Scottish romanticism, song and the public sphere, Murray Pittock; Singing 'more old songs than ever ploughman could': the songs of James Hogg and Robert Burns in the musical marketplace, Kirsteen McCue; Hogg's bardic epic: Queen Hynde and Macpherson's Ossian, Douglas S. Mack; The perilous castle(s) of The Three Perils of Man, Graham Tulloch; 'Perfectly ludicrous': the game of national meaning in The Three Perils of Man, Caroline McCracken-Flesher; James Hogg and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine: buying and selling the Ettrick Shepherd, Thomas C. Richardson; Empire and the 'brute creation': the limits of language in Hogg's 'The Pongos', Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson; Hogg and the American literary marketplace, Janette Currie; Bibliography; Index.

Sharon Alker is assistant professor of English and General Studies at Whitman College, USA, and Holly Faith Nelson is associate professor of English at Trinity Western University, Canada.