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 study explores the western Romantic period as a transition between the medieval “open body” and the modern “closed body.” It focuses on “closing body” phenomena such as “mesmerism” (i.e. animal magnetism), somnambulism, substance abuse, and the “second-self,” including notions of the subconscious and the trope of gothic Doppelgängers. This study draws from many pieces of western Romantic literature but is most centered around James Hogg’s 1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This new reading of Hogg’s novel suggests a core theme of body anxiety, rather than theological dispute.

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.