Diss.--Erlangen-Nürnberg--Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1989.

This thesis examines the nature of identity and the problems implicit in attempts to affirm it within the context of nineteenth century modernity. By exploring a number of texts from Romanticism to the fin de siecle, it can be. seen that autonomous and coherent identity is not a stable entity. Drawing upon Rene Descartes'work on constructions of selfhood as a starting point, these ideas can be detected in an assessment of identity's alter ego - the disidentical self which is characterised by masks, disguises, madness, pathological behaviour, criminality and addiction. Examples of such paradigms for disidentity can be found in a variety of cultural texts and genres throughout the century, from the self-consciously 'high' poetry of Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins to the popular Gothic novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. These metaphorisations of a crisis for identity in the nineteenth century are reflected in the analyses of insanity by physicians such as W.A.F. Browne and Henry Maudsley, prominent cultural critics such as Arthur Hallam and Amold, and the degeneration theorists of the late nineteenth century. Much of the project is shaped by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' assessment of modernity found in The Communist Manifesto, in particular their descriptions of nineteenth century socio-cultural topographies as fluid and vaporous. Stable identity is effectively threatened from a plethora of directions, including the Orient, criminality, sexual deviancy, scientific discovery and accelerated social change. Taking into consideration the many different ways in which identity can be problematised in the nineteenth century, three important sites of disidentification have been chosen for the purposes of this argument. Chapter one examines the split-personality, chapter two religious madness, and chapter three addiction. Each chapter demonstrates that within the conditions of nineteenth century modernity, the fragility and consequent fragmentation of individual identity is evoked in many different manifestations.

Reading James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner through a postsecular lens provides a new framework for spirituality. This framework establishes spirituality as a place of tension and uncertainty between the text’s main ideologies—Enlightenment rationality and religious, specifically Calvinist, fanaticism. The text explores this place of tension through its doubled narrative structure and by demonstrating the crisis of faith that the fictional Editor of the text undergoes. Confessions brings a compelling new paradigm to discussions of the postsecular that allows insight into the complex intersections of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as religious zealotry and the supernatural.

In The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), James Hogg uses the uncanny trope of the bier-right, a medieval superstitious belief of Christian origin that a murdered corpse will bleed in the presence or at the touch of the actual murderer, to negotiate his struggle with fading belief in local superstitions and religious faith in the Scottish Borders. Examining the origins of the bier-right, court cases involving the bier-right, and Hogg's minor works using the bier-right I offer a comparison of how Hogg manipulates and morphs this trope in Confessions. I also argue that the main character, the sinner Robert Wringhim, becomes a living-dead embodiment of the bier-right corpse.

This thesis explores Hogg's interpretation of indeterminacy both throughout his career and in Justified Sinner, especially in the character Gil-Martin. Hogg seems to reject the tradition of choosing one side over another in such a dichotomy, and instead chooses to look at both extremes as equally co-present. Hogg wrote Justified Sinner within the framework of the literary Gothic tradition and used Gothic tropes to create ambiguity throughout his novel, as is the case throughout his body of works. Many of the ambiguities in Justified Sinner center on the character Gil-Martin. My interpretation of Gil-Martin's ambiguity complicates the traditional scholarship on Justified Sinner. / Master of Arts

The memoir as a specific and unique literary genre has only recently been broached for in-depth critical study, with two major, book-length examinations of the genre appearing in the past decade. While the genre has been around in various formats with various conventions for as long as humans have written, only the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century called for a more sophisticated look at the genre. This thesis will use these recent observations on the memoir as a genre to shed new light on two classics of gothic literature: Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and its serialized prequel “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” and James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

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.

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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.

Persistent Pasts: Historical Palimpsests in Nineteenth-Century Prose traces Victorian historical discourse with specific attention to the works of Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot and their relation to historicism in earlier works by Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg. I argue that the Victorian response to the tense relation between the materialist Enlightenment and the idealist rhetoric of Romanticism marks a decidedly ethical turn in Victorian historical discourse. The writers introduce the dialectic of enlightened empiricism and romantic idealism to invoke the historical imagination as an ethical response to the call of the past. I read the dialectic and its invitation to ethics through the figure of the palimpsest. Drawing upon theoretical work on the palimpsest from Carlyle and de Quincey through Gérard Genette and Sarah Dillon, I analyze ways in which the materialist and idealist discourses interrupt each other and persist in one another. Central to my argument are concepts drawn from Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, and Frank Ankersmit that challenge and / or affirm historical materiality.