James Hogg was a bit of a country mouse, who barely went to school and worked as a shepherd in addition to writing in both English and Scots. He doesn’t leave his fellow country folk out of The Private Memoirs and Confessions, which includes several scenes of dialogue between the English-speaking gentry and their [...]
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John Carey’s introduction to my Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner cautions against the too-easy view that Hogg is simply a man of sense, against enthusiasm, and therefore writing a tract against the sort of fanatical Calvinism displayed by Wringhim.* How wrong is that view? We’ll [...] Gil-Martin can be most simply described as Robert Wringhim’s doppelgänger. Once he appears, he seems to show up wherever Wringhim is, or elsewhere in the form of Wringhim. Wringhim is well aware that his friend can change appearances to resemble those he is in company with, and he does so often. Wringhim himself has [...] This week begins with my contribution to the Wuthering Expectations Scottish Literature Reading Challenge and Clishmaclaver, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Amateur Reader is kindly reading along with me, so visit Wuthering Expectations for his posts as I spend the next three days with this delicious Scottish Gothic [...] The Provost, the first political novel, is the autobiography of “a genuine Machiavellian”—a natural born one, at that. The chief pleasure here for me, as I noted over at Wuthering Expectations, is Galt’s technical virtuosity in producing this amazing narrator, Mr. Pawkie, and his exploits. It’s hard to explain without just giving examples of [...] Amid all the obvious nods in The Ayrshire Legatees to Humphry Clinker, it’s the differences that stand out most. Mrs. Pringle is almost too much like her counterpart Tabitha Bramble, but the difference between Mr. Pringle and Matt Bramble, and the resultant difference in attitude between Andrew Pringle (“my son”) and Jeremy Melford (Matt’s [...] I took great delight in a new and welcome epistolary style afforded by John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees, and shall this week add my own small part to the John Galt Clishmaclaver. In this novel, we have letters much in the style of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker—four family members head off on [...] It can be hard to blog when you know someone else has already said everything you want to. In this instance, it would be James Wood in the essay Harper Perennial included in their edition of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I’ll press on in any case. Before I read the novel, I [...] I am always tickled when I find something in an old novel that mirrors an ultra-contemporary concern. Of course, most of the time it’s because the concern isn’t as ultra-contemporary as we tend to think, and the whole thing just reveals our ignorance about history. Which is all to the good. But I still [...] Today’s post is a question I really can’t answer. Another essay in the Norton Critical Edition (1983) of Humphry Clinker is by Wolfgang Iser, “The Generic Control of the Aesthetic Response: An Examination of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker.” Iser examines the epistolary form of Humphry Clinker and compares it with that of Richardson’s novels, and [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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