James Hogg Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Three Perils of Man (1822)
  2. The Three Perils of Woman (1823)
  3. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Collections

  1. The Queen’s Wake (1814)
  2. The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818)
  3. Winter Evening Tales (1820)
  4. The Shepherd’s Calendar (1828)
  5. Selected Stories and Sketches (1982)
  6. Tales of the Wars of Montrose (1996)

Novellas

  1. Mary Burnet (1828)

Non fiction

  1. Memoir of Burns (1836)

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James Hogg Books Overview

The Three Perils of Man

One of James Hogg’s longest and daring works, The Three Perils of Man tells two stories: a supernatural plot located at Aikwood Castle and a chivalric located at Roxburgh Castle. A series of embedded narratives provides the reader with, among other things, a picture of Hogg’s traditional and timeless rural world and an overview of early Scottish history. Gillian Hughes reproduces Hogg’s original manuscript, restoring the name of Sir Walter Scott used through most of the manuscript and passages excised or omitted during the preparation of the printed edition. Hogg’s explicit language is brought back, and the restoration of Scott’s name and character in particular make explicit the extent to which this novel challenges the author’s dominance in portraying a chivalric past. Any as*sessment of Hogg as a major novelist, especially a major historical novelist, must consider this edition of The Three Perils of Man.

The Three Perils of Woman

After a hundred years of relative obscurity, James Hogg 1770 1835 now ranks alongside Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson as one of Scotland’s leading writers. Highly regarded in his own lifetime, Hogg’s fame was largely influenced by the fact that he had been a shepherd in his youth and had received no formal education. With the posthumous collected editions of the 1830s and 1860s, however, his reputation suffered. The publishers of these editions, Blackie and Son of Glasgow, took great pains to remove his numerous ‘indelicacies’ and smooth away what they took to be the rough edges of his writing. It was this bland and lifeless version that the Victorians read, and, not surprisingly, Hogg became viewed as a second rate writer. With the republication of the original version of the in the 1890s, interest in Hogg’s work began to stir again, and over the last twenty years some of his more major works have been rereleased in good modern editions. It is just the tip of the iceberg, and as Douglas Dunn wrote in the in September 1988: ‘I can’t help but think that in almost any other country of Europe a complete, modern edition of a comparable author would have been available long ago.’ This series aims to meet this need, for the first time uncovering the full extent of Hogg’s considerable literary talents. Full introductions, explanatory notes and editorial comment accompany each text, making this collected edition the standard work on one of Scotland’s leading nineteenth century writers. is essentially a combination of two stories on similar themes, one set in Highlands following the Battle of Culloden and the other in Hogg’s Edinburgh. Daring in its narrative technique, its first readers were confused by the novel’s juxtaposition of the comic and the horrific as Hogg explored the relationship between fictional life, as portrayed in, say, the works of Walter Scott, and the realities of nineteenth century Scotland. Readers were also shocked by its treatment of such delicate matters as prostitution and venereal disease. Last printed in any form in the 1820s, this new edition reveals the exceptional quality of and puts it squarely back into mainstream of Scottish literature.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

One of the supreme masterpieces of Romantic fiction and Scottish literature, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a terrifying tale of murder and amorality, and of one man’s descent into madness and despair. James Hogg’s sardonic novel follows a young man who, falling under the spell of a mysterious stranger who bears an uncanny likeness to himself, embarks on a career as a serial murderer. The memoirs are presented by a narrator whose attempts to explain the story only succeed in intensifying its more baffling and bizarre aspects. Is the young man the victim of a psychotic delusion, or has he been tempted by the devil to wage war against God’s enemies? The authoritative and lively introduction by Ian Duncan covers the full range of historical and religious themes and contexts, offers a richer and more accurate consideration of the novel’s relation to Romantic fiction than found elsewhere, and sheds new light on the novel’s treatment of fanaticism. Copious notes identify the novel’s historical, biblical, theological, and literary allusions. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up to date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Queen’s Wake

The Queen’s Wake is one of the landmarks of British Romantic poetry. It focuses on the return of Mary, Queen of Scots to Scotland in 1561 to take personal rule of her kingdom after her years in France. In the poem poets and bards hold a poetic competition a ‘wake’ in Holyrood Palace to welcome the Queen home. When The Queen’s Wake was published in 1813 it proved an unexpected popular success, placing Hogg for a while alongside Byron and Scott as one of the most admired British poets of that time. Over the next six years Hogg made substantial revisions, making the poem even more attractive and saleable. The fifth edition 1819 is an enhanced and carefully polished version from a now established and respected poet. It is markedly different from the edgy, powerful and unsettling first version, which was the work of an impecunious and marginalised outsider. This book presents both the first and fifth edition of the poem.

The Brownie of Bodsbeck

The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales 1818 consists of an introductory poem, a short novel, and two stories. Hogg shapes this collection in ways that allow him to explore the life of his native district of Ettrick Forest during different historical periods. ‘The Hunt of Eildon’, a story set in the late Middle Ages, draws on Ettrick’s medieval role as royal hunting forest, and on the district’s rich traditional culture of oral story telling and the supernatural. In contrast, ‘The Wool Gatherer’ is set in Hogg’s own time, and is a love story complicated by issues concerning wealth and social class. The cornerstone of the collection, however, is the short novel ‘The Brownie of Bodsbeck, set during the civil and religious conflicts of the late seventeenth century. Here, as in Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1824, Hogg writes with power and insight as he explores the effects of extreme psychological stress. The Brownie is also remarkable for the innovative ways in which it locates narrative authority, not with members of the officer class, but in the voices of the ordinary people of Ettrick. Taken as a whole, The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales is one of Hogg’s major achievements. It is here published as a complete collection for the first time since 1818.

Winter Evening Tales

Winter Evening Tales 1820; second edition 1821 was James Hogg’s most successful work of prose fiction in his lifetime, as well as one of his best. It exhibits the most complex genesis of any of Hogg’s works and is the outstanding example of a ‘national’ genre pioneered by Hogg the miscellaneous collection of popular and traditional narratives, and the experimental medley of novellas, tales, poems and sketches posed a lively alternative to the dominant form of the historical novel established by Walter Scott. The collection includes terse masterpieces of mystery and the uncanny, virtuoso improvisations on folktale themes, and the highlights of the edition two brilliant autobiographical novellas, ‘The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee’ and ‘Love Adventures of Mr George Cochrane’. Many of the Tales were republished in the posthumous collected set of Hogg’s fiction these unreliable texts were reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. However Winter Evening Tales fell into almost total obscurity after the middle of the nineteenth century. The Stirling/ South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg is therefore delighted to be republishing this key work in Hogg’s career in its entirety for the first time since the early nineteenth century.

The Shepherd’s Calendar

James Hogg is one of the acknowledged masters of the short story. Some of his best stories appeared in The Shepherd’s Calendar, a work of the 1820s in which he sets out to re create on paper the manner and the content of the traditional oral storytelling of Ettrick Forest, the remote and mountainous sheep farming district in which he grew up. Like Hogg’s masterpiece The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, several of the stories from The Shepherd’s Calendar deal disturbingly and hauntingly with the supernatural, and explore psychological depths with a remarkable insight and intensity. The Shepherd’s Calendar also draws on Hogg’s experiences as a young shepherd in the 1790s as it produces a convincing and very human picture of the dangers, the pleasures, and the tensions of the lives of the rural poor in Scotland in the years that followed the French Revolution. This Polygon paperback is based on the acclaimed hardback edition of The Shepherd’s Calendar for the Stirling / South Carolina Collected Works of James Hogg Edinburgh University Press, 1995.

Tales of the Wars of Montrose

This collection of short stories focuses on the Scottish civil war of 1644 45, in which the Marquis of Montrose led his royalist forces in a series of stunning victories against the odds before his final defeat at Philiphaugh. Each of Hogg’s five tales centres on one of the five major battles of Montrose’s brilliant but ultimately futile campaign. Each tale is utterly different from the others in genre and tone, but taken together they build up a composite picture of what it was like to experience the ‘anarchy and confusion’ of the time at first hand.

Memoir of Burns

Written in 1832 but published only in 1836, after Hogg’s death, Memoir of Burns was the culmination of Hogg’s lifelong interest in Burns’s poetry and life. Among the most neglected of his writings, this volume has never before been republished separately from the multi volume edition of Burns for which it was written, Volumes 1 4 of the Hogg Motherwell Works of Robert Burns. This is the first modern editorial treatment of the work. The only scholarly edition that documents Hogg’s use of his sources Contains the comments Hogg made on individual Burns poems and songs in the annotations to the Works volumes Draws on hitherto unused manuscript material to clarify the relation between Hogg and Motherwell in the editing of the Works.

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