The First World Congress of Scottish Literatures

Next summer, the University of Glasgow will be hosting the first World Congress of Scottish Literatures. The Congress will be held between July 2nd and 5th, 2014. Organizers are still accepting submissions on the four main congress topics: authors; theorizing Scottish literature; Gaelic, Mediaeval, Music and Artistic Scotland; and Scotland in global culture and context. The deadline for 100-word abstracts is April 30, 2013. If you are interested in participating in this historic congress, e-mail an abstract to scottishliteraturecongress2014@glasgow.ac.uk. This promises to be a very exciting event in the field of Scottish Studies. For all of the details on the congress, go to its webpage.

 

The University of Glasgow

In Memoriam: Professor Susan Manning

News of the recent passing of Dr. Susan (Valentine) Manning, Grierson Professor of English Literature and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, has deeply saddened those working on Scottish Studies across the globe. Dr. Manning's scholarship on Scottish literature and transatlantic literary studies was held in the highest esteem by those in her field. An expert in the Scottish Enlightenment, Dr. Manning contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the Scot, Scotland, and Scottish culture at a critical historical moment. As a scholar she often worked on establishing connections between texts, people, and nations, brilliantly weaving in her most recent publication, "Robert Burns's Transatlantic Afterlives," the life and writings of Burns, the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the novels of Toni Morrison, the theory of Colin McArthur, the letters of the Kerrs of Dalry (Ayrshire), and more. In that chapter, Dr. Manning reflected on "the shaping process that the past exerts on the present," and there is no doubt that her own life and works will continue to shape and inspire her family, friends, and colleagues. 

Dr. Manning’s obituary recently appeared in The Scotsman.

Holly Faith Nelson

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Selected Book Covers

Covering The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

“Book covers can be seen as a doorway through which we glimpse the text. The illustrated front is an advertisement and a tease, partially revealing, partially concealing the content.  It is the threshold between the public commercial arena where the book is for sale and the more intimate world of the text where the author speaks to us alone. In the bookshop or the library it is a place of negotiation and decision. The cover dallies with us – should we open the book? Should we take it and own it? Will it give us the enjoyment we seek? In particular it leads to browsing behaviour and is a site for the pleasures of choice and anticipation which is a prelude to the sale and consumption of a work” (Alexis Weedon, "In Real Life: Book Covers in the Internet Bookstore." Judging a Book by its Cover, ed. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007], 117).

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Intro. André Gide. London: The Cresset Press, 1947. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Intro. André Gide. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Print. Oxford English Novel Series.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. John Carey. New Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Print. Oxford Paperbacks.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Intro. Robert Adams.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1970. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. John Wain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Print. Penguin Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Print. Penguin Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. Elaine Petrie. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1988. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Intro. David Groves. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1991. Print. 

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1992. Print. Everyman's Library.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1996. Print. Wordsworth Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Print. Wordsworth Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1999. Print. Wordsworth Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. John Carey.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Oxford World's Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Köln: Könemann, 1999. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. Adrian Hunter. Peterborogh, ON: Broadview, 2001. Print.

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Hogg, James. Memorias privadas y confesiones de un pecador justificado. Trans. Francisco Torres Oliver. Madrid: Valdemar, 2001. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Intro. Margaret Livesey. New York: New York Review of Books, 2002. Print. NYRB Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. Peter Garside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Print. Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Intro. David Blair. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2003. Print. Wordsworth Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2003. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. Karl Miller. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006. Print. Penguin Classics.

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Hogg, James. Memorias privadas y confesiones de un pecador justificado. Trans. Francisco Torres Oliver. Madrid: Nórdica Libros, 2008. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Radford, VA: Wilder, 2008. Print.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Pref. Ian Rankin. New Ed. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008. Print. 

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Intro. Lucy Hughes-Hallett. London: Vintage Books, 2009. Print. Vintage Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.  Weardale: Aziloth Books, 2010. Print. Cathedral Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. Ian Duncan. New. Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print. Oxford World’s Classics.

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Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2012. Print. Penguin Classics.

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Dr. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Professor of English and Department Head at the University of Wyoming, presented a paper on teaching Hogg at the James Hogg conference at the University of Stirling in 2007. During this talk she noted that covers of editions of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner "demonstrate both the determination of publishers to classify the text and their difficulty in so doing." She stated that "covers imply particular understandings or failures to understand the complexities of this text." She concluded that "perhaps the Francisco de Goya cover (The Pilgrimage to San Isidro) on the 2006 Penguin Classics edition, edited by Karl Miller, comes closest to conveying these complexities, with its indication of the subjective disturbance suffered by Robert Wringhim’s audience and by the audience for The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner." 

Holly Faith Nelson

James Hogg: A Brief Note on Celebrity 

It has been argued that Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott were the first ‘celebrities’ in the modern sense of the word. In Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, Ghislaine McDayter contends that “Byromania marks the emergence of celebrity as a cultural industry” (8). In The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Josephine Guy and Ian Small identify Byron and Scott as two of the first authors to take advantage of the new “cultural apparatus” that  developed after the timely  “conjunction of a “Romantic cult of selfhood” and “the growing industrialization of print culture” (30). As Penny Fielding notes in her entry on Hogg in The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, “Hogg was very conscious of literary celebrity” and felt diminished when he did not receive the same recognition as Scott and other members of the Edinburgh literati (67). But as Peter Garside reminds us in his chapter in James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace, after Scott’s death, Hogg “found himself lionized as a literary celebrity” after “a highly successful visit to London” in 1832 (36). Even before then, Hogg was viewed as a celebrity of sorts, serving the role, for example, of “celebrity speaker” at a Burns Supper in Edinburgh in January 1815, as Clark McGinn recalls in his recent essay on Burns celebrations in Robert Burns and Global Culture (193). In Hogg’s case, celebrity was more of a double-edged sword than it was for Scott, given that his fame was sometimes rooted in an understanding of him as a strange curiosity: a peasant prodigy who made for an interesting spectacle at the dinner parties of the elite. However, despite such condescension and some negative publicity that figured him as an object of ridicule, Hogg established himself as an important literary figure in Britain during his lifetime and relished his fame in the Americas, writing in 1833 to an anonymous American fan: “I am most proud of being valued so highly by my transatlantic brethren.”   

Three rather interesting aspects of Hogg’s celebrity that might resonate with the experience of modern celebrities are (a) the appearance of fans at his home—whom in Hogg’s case, his family couldn’t afford to feed; (b) the flow of fan mail that appeared on his doorstep, which his wife Margaret had to read through, evaluate, and cull; and (c) the reporting of his activities through gossip, which he was concerned might negatively affect his family life. To learn more about the celebrity of Hogg in the last few years of his life, read the third volume of his letters: The Collected Letters of James Hogg: Volume 3, 1832-1835, ed. Gillian Hughes with associate editors Douglas S. Mack, Robin MacLachlan, and Elaine Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

Holly Faith Nelson

Lecture on James Hogg in

Terra Haute, Indiana

 

 

Photograph © Alan W. Alker

Drs. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson will be giving a lecture on the life and works of James Hogg at Indiana State University in Terra Haute, Indiana, on November 15, 2012. The title of the lecture is "The Edge of Scottish Romanticism: James Hogg,'king o' the mountain and fairy school.'" It is part of the Joseph S. Schick Lecture Series (http://www.indstate.edu/english/josephschick.asp). 

In Memoriam: Louis Simpson

The BBC web site has announced the death at the age of 89 of the US poet and writer Louis Simpson (1923-2012).  Best known to Hogg scholars for his 1962 book James Hogg: A Critical Study, which for a long time was the most substantial monograph on Hogg, Louis Simpson was a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, whose work was admired by Seamus Heaney and others.  Further details on his career can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19633296.

The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg:

A Must Buy

The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg, edited by Ian Duncan and the late Douglas Mack, has recently appeared on the literary scene (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Its well-researched, lucid, and engaging sixteen essays on every major aspect of the life and works of James Hogg make it mandatory reading for any scholar interested in seriously taking up the study of James Hogg and for any general reader who simply wants to gain a better understanding of the author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the work by Hogg most often read and admired. Almost all of the contributors to the volume have been researching and writing on Hogg for a decade or more, none longer than Douglas Mack, who worked on Hogg for more than forty years before his untimely death in 2009.

The Table of Contents of the remarkably affordable Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg is as follows:

Brief Biography of James Hogg - Ian Duncan

Introduction: Hogg and his Worlds - Ian Duncan

1. Hogg, Ettrick, and Oral Tradition - Valentina Bold and Suzanne Gilbert

2. Hogg and the Book Trade - Peter Garside

3. Magazines, Annuals and the Press - Gillian Hughes

4. Hogg's Reception and Reputation - Suzanne Gilbert

5. Hogg and the Highlands - Hans de Groot

6. Hogg and Working-Class Writing - Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson

7. Politics and the Presbyterian Tradition - Douglas S. Mack

8. Hogg and Nationality - Caroline McCracken-Flesher

9. Hogg, Gender, and Sexuality - Silvia Mergenthal

10. Hogg and Music - Kirsteen McCue

11. Hogg as Poet - Fiona Wilson

12. Hogg and the Theatre - Meiko O'Halloran

13. Hogg and the Short Story - John Plotz

14. Hogg and the Novel - Graham Tulloch

15. Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Approaches - Penny Fielding

16. Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Afterlives - Gillian Hughes