James Hogg (1770-1835) was highly regarded as a writer during his lifetime, but after his death his reputation declined. During the nineteenth century Hogg's works were widely available in editions based on collections published shortly after his death by Blackie & Son of Glasgow. These editions were sadly inadequate, in particular with regard to Hogg's prose. They completely omitted several works of great merit for example, The Three Perils of Woman; and they printed thoroughly corrupt texts of a number of Hogg's major works - for example The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In recent years, more reliable editions of a number of Hogg's works have been published. This has encouraged a revival of interest in Hogg, and his reputation has increased substantially. A just estimate of the full range and depth of Hogg's achievement will only become possible, however, once the many remaining textual and bibliographical problems have been solved. The present thesis seeks to make a contribution to the completion of this task by providing a detailed examination of the textual problems presented by a number of Hogg's more important prose works; and by providing an annotated listing of all the surviving texts of Hogg's prose which are of interest to an editor.

For most twentieth-century readers, the name of James Hogg, if it means anything at all, is inextricably linked with The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which has been hailed as one of the most important of all Scottish novels. However, this was not always the case: in fact, his considerable reputation ln his own day was won not by The Confessions, which was read by few of his contemporaries, but by his poems, such as The Queen's Wake or The Pilgrims of the Sun, and by songs such as "When the kye comes hame" and "The Skylark" which were the mainstay of many an Edinburgh social gathering, and maintained their popularity throughout the century. However, towards its end, prominent literary critics such as George Saintsbury and Andrew Lang were already giving The Confessions of a Justified Sinner the notice which was to raise it to the position of overwhelming dominance over the rest of Hogg's work which it enjoyed until the past few years. However, the recent publication after many years of absence from print of The Three Perils of Man and The Brownie of Bodsbeck, together with a volume of selected poems and one which reprints some of Hogg's best short stories, and the steady growth in the number of specialised articles on Hogg's work, notably ones by Douglas Gifford, Douglas Mack, and Alexander Scott, suggest that there is need to consider the rest of Hogg's output and the position The Confessions holds in his development. It must seem to many present-day readers that Hogg s wrltlng of The Confessions of a Justified Sinner was little short of miraculous, for to a reader who lacks any idea of the works that led up to it, The Confessions seems a surprlslng work to be produced by a fifty-five year old Border sheep farmer, who was confessedly illiterate until the eighteenth year of his life. Earlier surveys of his career by Edith C Batho and Louis Simpson, while containing much interesting biographical detail and stimulating critical comment, have for the most part failed to discern any pattern in the author's career which can account for his achievement in this novel. The intention behind this thesis is to explain, by describing Hogg's literary development from the days of his illiteracy to the time when he could be treated an an equal by the foremost literary figures of his day, how far Hogg's success in The Confessions was the consequence of his experience in his earlier writing. This study will discuss to what extent the course of Hogg's career was affected by the unusual circumstances of his education, as he tackled in an acute form the problems faced by all writers in finding their own voice when under the influence of powerful literary examples. The study is not meant to be a biography of Hogg, though certainly biographical details are included, and the discussion follows for the most part a chronological path: at all periods of Hogg's life the natural development of his talent came into conflict with the need to earn a living, while his confidence in his powers was frequently drained by the personal insecurity which arose from his unusual background. However, no new facts are presented, the details being taken in the main from Douglas S Mack's careful edition of Hogg's Memoir of the Author's Life, supplemented by some of the information contained in the Hogg letters to be found in the National Library of Scotland. Equally, this discussion is not meant to be an 'exhaustive survey of the sources of Hogg's works: no attempt has been made to identify every influence to which the author was exposed. It is the contention of this thesis that there is a self-evident model, about which the author was seldom secretive, behind each of his more important writings, and that of much greater interest than any list of all. Hogg's sources is the consideration of how he coped with the knowledge that he was following in the footsteps of a predecessor, and how far he succeeded in producing individual work while under those pressures. To that end, I have concentrated on the extent to which each of his most important poems and each of his longer stories is a consistent and coherent whole. This has involved me 1n a discussion of the form and content of each of these works in an attempt to establish whether the author has realised his intentions in it without being deflected by external pressures. A final chapter discusses the pieces he wrote for the less formal context of the literary magazines of his day and seeks to determine the value of these miscellaneous works, to which he devoted most of his attention in the last years of his life. Several other more peripheral discussions have been rendered necessary only because of the incomplete nature of Scottish Literature studies at the present time, when so much groundwork must be done before one can begin to concentrate on more specific subjects.

In recent years the writings of James Hogg have attracted much critical interest. Illuminating work has been done, but so far scholarship has not successfully come to terms with Hogg's great debt to tradition, despite the fact that this debt has long been recognised. Sir George Douglas wrote in 1899 that in his better prose tales Hogg "has incorporated the whole body of the floating popular mythology of Scotland - a fact which, should the day ever come when the stories fail to charm as stories, will still command for them the regard of students of history and folk-lore. An understanding of the role and use of folk tradition in literature has been difficult to achieve because of the lack of proper critical tools to permit objective assessment. By literary standards folk tradition has been devalued to the status of "fairy tales" something pleasant for children - and its workings often seem to smack of the irrational or highly coincidental. The fact that Hogg, or any other writer, uses folk tradition in his literary work should not be taken as some sort of aberration from literary convention but rather as a positive contribution. However, merely recognising its presence is not enough. The present work will therefore concern itself with the kinds of tradition Hogg uses, the status and meaning of these traditions and the way in which Hogg adapts and develops them to meet the needs of a new audience that is literary rather than traditional. Any discussion of Hogg's relationship with folklore must first examine Hogg's upbringing and education and the nature of the Border community in which he grew up to try and discover something about the kind of traditional sources Hogg would have known, the kind of material available and the status it would have enjoyed. All these things governed Hogg's own attitude to different types of folk tradition and therefore helped to determine the ways in which he presented his material and ideas. It is helpful to begin a study of Hogg's work by way of his songs. Songwriting provides a natural and acceptable transition from folk tradition to literature as it has a well-developed tradition of its own. This stage of Hogg's work is very important in helping to establish an idea of the unity and homogeneity of his work. Hogg was able to compose songs with apparent ease and throughout his career he turned this to good account but his greatest achievements are to be measured in his narrative verse and prose. The narrative verse shows Hogg beginning to develop his own ideas more creatively, hammering out the themes that were eventually to dominate his work. From there it is then possible to make a deeper study of the key themes, principally superstition, the supernatural and religion, history and community. The discussion will concentrate here on the wealth of short prose which forms the bulk of Hogg's work. This is partly to emphasise where the main force of Hogg's creativity lay for this concern seems always to have been with narrative or story. However, the dominance of the novel in literary tradition has led to critical emphasis on the Confessions at the expense of the other shorter works. The nature of the contemporary literary community with its proliferation of magazines, journals and annuals did foster Hogg's preoccupation with the short anecdotal form. Despite this, the preponderance of folk tradition in Hogg's works and the emphasis on a traditional tale telling context and on the sort of community environment in which this tradition survived is illuminating. It suggests that Hogg was not trying to write novels but to recreate in some way the traditional story telling experience through his tales. This can be seen on a larger scale in the Queen's Wake or the story-telling competition in the Three Perils of Man. It is in the form and structure of Hogg's work that the most subtle links are to be found with folk tradition. In particular, by studying form and structure, it is possible to understand more clearly Hogg's exploitation of the narrator's role. Taken over all, this thesis hopes to show the clear links in theme, idea, form and structure between the shortest of Hogg's pieces and longer, more sustained efforts such as the Brownie or the Confessions. An understanding of Hogg's use of folk tradition can therefore do much more than explain certain motifs or odd references. It shows that tradition is not an excuse for sloppy structure or improbable events but a real tool by which Hogg enlarged his creative capability. Thus tradition provides the reader with an important key to Hogg's work. The concern with folk literature in the discussion which follows has necessitated the use of a number of terms drawn from the critical analysis of folklore. The meaning of these terms should be clear from the context but the following brief guide may be helpful. The name Marchen is employed when discussing the magic tale, the fullest and most elaborate form of folk narrative. Examples form types 300-749 in the Aarne-Thomson classification system and the name is taken from Kinder-und Hausmarchen, the collection compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This term is used to avoid the idea of "fairy tales" which has rather dismissive overtones of the nursery. In a traditional community the folktale has a serious role in addition to its entertainment value and these distinctions are important to an understanding of Hogg's use of folklore. The term "informant", used in the discussion of Hogg's family, refers to a source or transmitter of items of folklore from whom material is recorded, learned or otherwise preserved.

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The Author and the Shepherd: The Paratextual Self-Representations of James Hogg (1807-1835) This project establishes a literary-cultural trajectory in the career of Scottish poet and author James Hogg (1770-1835) through the close reading of his self-representational paratextual material. It argues that these paratexts played an integral part in Hogg’s writing career and, as such, should be considered among his most important works. Previous critics have drawn attention to Hogg’s paratextual self-representations; this project, however, singles them out for comprehensive analysis as literary texts in their own right, comparing and contrasting how Hogg’s use of such material differed from other writers of his period, as well as how his use of it changed and developed as his career progressed. Their wider cultural significance is also considered. Hogg not only used paratextual material to position himself strategically in his literary world but also to question, challenge and undermine some of the dominant socio-cultural paradigms and hierarchies of the early-nineteenth century, not least the role and position of ‘peasant poets’ (such as himself) in society. Hogg utilised self-representational paratextual material throughout his literary career. Unlike other major writers of the period Hogg, a self-taught shepherd, had to justify and explain his position in society as ‘an author’ through these pseudo-autobiographical paratexts, which he attached to most of his works (in such forms as memoirs, introductions, dedications, notes and footnotes, and introductory paragraphs to stories). Via these liminal devices he created and propagated his authorial persona of ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’, whose main function was to draw attention to Hogg’s preeminent place in the traditional world, and to his status as a ‘peasant poet’. It was on the basis of this position that he argued for his place in the Scottish literary world of the early-nineteenth century and, ultimately, in literary history. His paratextual self-representations are thus a crucial element in his literary career. Drawing on Gerard Genette’s description of ‘the paratext’, the authorial theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (along with more recent authorial criticism), as well as autobiographical theory, this project traces Hogg’s changing use of self-representational paratexts throughout his career, from his first major work The Mountain Bard (1807) to his final book of stories Tales of the Wars of Montrose (1835). By reading Hogg’s paratexts closely, this project presents a unique view – from the inside out – of the specific literary world into which Hogg attempted to position himself as an author.

A self-educated shepherd, Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835) spoke from a position outside the dominant discourse, depicting issues of his age related to gender, class, and ethnicity by giving voice to people from the margins and, thus (either consciously or unconsciously), revealing gender politics and Britain's imperial aims. Hogg’s contemporary critics received his work rather negatively, viewing his subjects such as prostitution, out-of-wedlock-pregnancy, infanticide, and the violence of war as violating the principles of literary politeness. Hogg’s obstinacy in addressing these issues, however, supports the thesis that his aim was far more significant than challenging the expectations of his contemporary readers. This project shows that pragmatics can be applied productively to literature because its eclecticism offers the possibility of developing a detailed discussion about three aspects of literary communication—the author, the reader and the text—without prioritising any of them. Literature is an instance of language in use (the field of pragmatics) where an author creates the texts and a reader recreates the author’s message through the text. Analysis of Hogg’s flouting of Grice’s maxims for communication strategies and of his defying the principles of politeness enables a theoretically supported discussion about Hogg’s possible intentions, as well as about how his intentions were perceived by the literary establishment of his time; while both relevance theory and Bakhtin’s socio-linguistics enriched by a historically contextualised politeness shed new light on the negative reception of Hogg’s texts.