The Collected Works of James Hogg: A series of lay sermons

Couverture
Edinburgh University Press, 1995 - 176 pages
essential to its completeness, but not one of the most exciting of the volumes. It is hard to see it arousing the same level of critical discussion as has followed the re-publication of The Three Perils of Woman under the joint editorship of David Groves, Antony Hasler, and Douglas Mack, for example, or Gillian Hughes's previous volume, Tales of the Wars of Montrose. Even here, some of Hogg's characteristic narrative complexities surface, however. [...] It is a little hard to know what to do with such apparently wanton and provocative narratorial disturbance, the more so as it does not seem to issue in corresponding equivocation in the body of the Sermons themselves. The editor, wisely it seems to me, refrains from attempting a resolution of the inconsistency at this point; it is a notable example of the restraint and good judgment which characterizes her work, a measuredness that keeps it well clear of the strain of over-ingenious interpretation which has accompanied Hogg's just --

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À propos de l'auteur (1995)

Son of a Scottish shepherd and descended from minstrels, Hogg led a life that has the fictional quality Thomas Hardy was to capture later in the century in his novels of country life. After meeting Sir Walter Scott in 1802, Hogg adopted the name "Ettrick Shepherd," a pseudonym under which he published original lyrics and ballads. In 1814 Hogg met William Wordsworth and enjoyed literary friendships in the Lake District, although he parodied the other poets' styles and mannerisms in The Poetic Mirror (1816). He married at age 50 and fathered five children, whom he tried to support by the same kind of unproductive farming at which Robert Burns had labored a generation before. Like Burns, his convivial nature and verbal talents won him a following in fashionable society, especially after the publication of his first novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), when he was 53 years old. The first novel to explore psychological aberrations, it traces the collapse of a personality under the pressure of social conformity, native superstition, and religious excess. Since the introduction by Andre Gide to the 1947 Cresset edition, it has acquired an academic following and a new popularity. There is a James Hogg Society, founded in 1982, which publishes a newsletter.

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