James Hogg And The Literary Marketplace

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.

This study argues for Hogg's centrality to British Romanticism, resituating his work in relation to many of his more famous Romantic contemporaries. Hogg creates a unique literary style which, the author argues, is best described as 'kaleidoscopic' in view of its similarities with David Brewster's kaleidoscope, invented in 1816.

Pragmatics and Literature is an important collection of new work by leading practitioners working at the interface between pragmatic theory and literary analysis. The individual studies collected here draw on a variety of theoretical approaches and are concerned with a range of literary genres. All have a shared focus on applying ideas from specific pragmatic frameworks to understanding the production, interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. A full-length introductory chapter highlights distinctions and contrasts between pragmatic theories, but also brings out complementarities, shared aims and assumptions, and ways in which different pragmatic theories can make different contributions to our understanding of literary texts. The book as a whole encourages a sense of coherence for the field and presents insights from various approaches for systematic comparison. Building on previous work by the editors, the contributors and others, it makes a significant contribution to the growing field of pragmatic literary stylistics.

Walter Scott and Fame is a study of correspondences between Scott and socially and culturally diverse readers of his work in the English-speaking world in the early nineteenth century. Examining authorship, reading, and fame, the book is based on extensive archival research, especially in the collection of letters to Scott in the National Library of Scotland. Robert Mayer demonstrates that in Scott's literary correspondence constructions of authorship, reading strategies, and versions of fame are posited, even theorized. Scott's reader-correspondents invest him with power but they also attempt to tap into or appropriate some of his authority. Scott's version of authorship sets him apart from important contemporaries like Wordsworth and Byron, who adhered, at least as Scott viewed the matter, to a rarefied conception of the writer as someone possessed of extraordinary power. The idea of the author put in place by Scott in dialogue with his readers establishes him as a powerful figure who is nevertheless subject to the will of his audience. Scott's literary correspondence also demonstrates that the reader can be a very powerful figure and that we should regard reading not just as the reception of texts but also as the apprehension of an author-function. Thus, Scott's correspondence makes it clear that the relationship between authors and readers is a dynamic, often fraught, connection, which needs to be understood in terms of the new culture of celebrity that emerged during Scott's working life. Along with Byron, the study shows, Scott was at the centre of this transformation.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

A controversial self-taught shepherd who violated the rules of literary decorum to reveal the dark side of the Scottish margins. Through a strategic use of nineteenth-century stereotypes of femininity and masculinity he lays bare the intersection with class and ethnicity in Scotland.

Published anonymously in 1824, this gothic mystery novel was written by Scottish author James Hogg. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was published as if it were the presentation of a century-old document. The unnamed editor offers the reader a long introduction before presenting the document written by the sinner himself.

James Hogg (1770-1835) is increasingly recognised as a major Scottish author and one of the most original figures in European Romanticism. 16 essays written by international experts on Hogg draw on recent breakthroughs in research to illuminate the contexts and debates that helped to shape his writings. The book provides an indispensable guide to Hogg's life and worlds, his publishing history, reception and reputation, his treatments of politics, religion, nationality, social class, sexuality and gender, and the diverse literary forms - ballads, songs, poems, drama, short stories, novels, periodicals - in which he wrote.