Private Memoirs Research Articles

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James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner(1824) is often mentioned as an ambiguous work that deals with religious mania and split personality. Also, his story becomes more like open puzzles in crime fiction through gothic and metafictional techniques. Beneath his complicated contents and forms, however, we need to find Hogg's political and cultural intentions. From a long time ago, Scottish mysticism has been suppressed by the government and authentic religion. His intentional use of antinomianism is a pretext to address the independent and undaunted spirit of Scottish people whose faith is close to fatalism. The reinterpretations of his work by contemporary novelists reveal the author's original intentions well.

Russian Reception by James Hogg (Soviet period)

The article continues a series of works devoted to the Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770–1835), a famous interpreter of folk ballads and author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Facts and materials related to the perception of J. Hogg in Russia in Soviet times are collected and summarized. It is indicated that during the period under review, in the studies of Russian literary scholars, separate judgments were made on the traditions of R. Burns in the works of J. Hogg, the role of W. Scott in his fate, etc. The Russian translations of the works of the English and American classics (in particular, J. G. Byron, E. A. Poe, J. F. Cooper) that appeared in the Soviet era, which contained references to the Scottish poet, are noted. The publications, which included information about J. Hogg, are comprehended, with special attention paid to S. Ya. Marshak’s epigram “Inscription on the Stone” mentioning J. Hogg’s name, the research of M. P. Alekseev, B. G. Reizov, R. M. Samarin and etc. The scientific works of A. D. Ivanova, first of all her Ph.D. thesis “The originality of the artistic work of James Hogg” (1990), which contributed, along with the changes in social life that occurred at the turn of the J. Hogg, the emergence of new translations of his works are analyzed.

Russian Reception by James Hogg (Mid-19<sup>th</sup> — Early 20<sup>th</sup> Centuries)

The article continues a series of works devoted to the Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), a famous interpreter of folk ballads and author of “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (1824). The facts and materials related to the perception of J. Hogg in Russia in the middle of the XIX — early XX century are collected and summarized. It is noted that during the period under review, no new translations of J. Hogg's poetry and prose into Russian were created, however, in the articles of leading literary critics (N. G. Chernyshevsky, M. L. Mikhailov, A. V. Druzhinin) when analyzing the works of N. V. Gogol, T. Goode, the translation activity of I. S. Turgenev expressed opinions on certain aspects of the biography and work of the Scottish author. It has been established that the main source of information about J. Hogge and his work was for the Russian reader of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries translated publications on the history of English literature and culture, other books by Western European researchers published in Russia. The manifestations of interest of Russian researchers and popularizers of English literature in the work of J. Hogg are comprehended, with special attention paid to the article by N. A. Solovyov-Nesmelov “James Hogg”, which was a literary sketch about the childhood of the writer, and the essay by K. F. Tiander the novel of the first quarter of the 19th century, which offers a different assessment from the predecessors of the Scottish author’s activities as a continuer of the traditions of M. Edgeworth.

Wilhelmina Zyndram-Kościałkowska aphoristic writing as a mode of autobiography

The article discusses the manuscripts of Wilhelmina Zyndram-Kościałkowska (1844–1926) – a writer, literary critic, translator, publicist, one of the most important fi gures in the literary circles of Grodno and Warsaw in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her manuscripts (private calendars, diaries, memoirs and notebooks) are kept in the Offi ce of the Chief Archivist of Lithuania (Lietuvos Valstybės Istorijos Archyvas). Kościałkowska 98 aphorisms, analyzed in his article, were dedicated to Henryk Nusbaum (1849–1937), a Warsaw neurologist, publicist, medical philosopher, and included in her diaries and memoirs titled Kajet z notatkami, urywkami poezji, fragmentami wspomnień. Her aphoristic writing can be interpreted as a particular mode of autobiography. Kościałkowska’s aphorisms illuminate the microdimensions of her autobiographical position, her critical style, her understanding of loneliness and of other people’s behavior, and fi nally her intertextual dialogues with culture, literature and art. Kościałkowska thus establishes a perspective on a range of cultural phenomena as well as on the process of her own identity construction.

Dispatches from Cairo to India: Editors, Publishing Houses, and a Republic of Letters

Abstract This article documents the existence of a vibrant republic of letters stretching from Cairo to Karachi in the middle of the twentieth century. On the basis of private letters, memoirs, and modern editions of classical texts, this article recreates the scholarly and personal commitments of a new class of professional editors (muḥaqqiqūn). These editors were responsible for the emergence of some of the most influential publishing houses in the Islamic world, and their contribution to the production and circulation of pre-modern texts has had a profound impact on the intellectual development of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They believed that cultivating a republic of letters was necessary because it served the world of learning and scholarship. In this way was fashioned a virtual community, separated by national and political borders, but united by visions of history and a shared sense of moral and intellectual duty.

Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries ed. by Kevin Binfield and William J. Christmas (review)

Reviewed by: Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries ed. by Kevin Binfield and William J. Christmas Lucien Darjeun Meadows Kevin Binfield and William J. Christmas, editors. Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Modern Language Association of America, 2018. College-level courses increasingly include literary works by 18th and 19th century laboring-class British writers. While major publishers (i.e. Broadview, Norton, and Wiley-Blackwell) are incorporating them in teaching anthologies for eighteenth and nineteenth century studies and the Romantic and Victorian periods, there remains no major classroom anthology devoted to these laboring-class writers. In the absence of an established laboring-class canon, teachers pursue diverse and eclectic methods to bring these voices into the classroom. In this new volume, Kevin Binfield and William J. Christmas have collected thirtyone essays by professors and scholars who discuss their methods and inspire new pathways. The comprehensive introduction offers "a celebration" (19) of current means of bringing laboring-class writers into classrooms and stresses that "the key is to replace nostalgia with reflection" (3). In a time of growing awareness for diversity, equity, and inclusion, educators and students may be more comfortable engaging the topics of race, gender, and sexual orientation. These topics often are communicated as intrinsic characteristics deserving inclusion, while socioeconomic class may be perceived more as an external characteristic to be transcended by hard work and a strong ethic. Because of this, students, learning in the college environment where success and graduation are tied to socioeconomic improvement, frequently respond to laboring-class literature through a lens that distances personal nostalgia. Instructors are encouraged to guide them toward more critical, intellectual reflection. The collection's four major sections are all organized in rough chronological order: "Teaching Genres," with six essays; "Teaching Selected Authors and Works," with eight essays; "Pedagogical Strategies," with eleven essays; and "Types of Courses," with six essays. Binfield and Christmas ensured discussion on a range of literary genres, with nineteen total essays on poetry, ten on prose forms, and two on drama, a critical distribution that mirrors the creative distribution by [End Page 190] these laboring-class writers. Additionally, the collection's extensive final "Resources" section provides citations for finding primary texts, electronic sources, contextual aids, paintings, recordings, and sheet music, as well as annotations for the major databases Laboring-Class Poets Online and Digital Miscellanies Index to help scholars continue their engagement and course development. This volume is a valuable asset to emerging and established instructors. Many will benefit from Moyra Haslett's essay on framing and questioning works and identities through course design, raising the stakes (and opportunities) of course and syllabus creation. Others will find useful Fiona Wilson's case study on teaching James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) as a work of experimental fiction to challenge students toward new insights, or Florence S. Boos's discussion of her course on the poetry of Victorian working-class women. Several contributors share experiences in pairing a more canonical writer with a lesser-known laboring-class writer, such as Cassandra Falke's pairing of William Wordsworth with Christopher Thomson under the theme of 'wandering,' and Stacey Floyd's pairing of Elizabeth Gaskell with Thomas Wheeler to teach Chartist fiction, providing new routes into working with these writers. For instructors who may already incorporate laboring-class literature, the nuanced discussion of Corey E. Andrews on teaching the Georgic poetry genre through laboring-class examples, as well as Anne Milne's application of a labor studies approach to poetry, could deepen one's existing engagement with these writers and periods. Further, numerous contributors discuss how to include laboring-class works in courses beyond the upper-level literature seminar. Steven Epley shares his experience leading a service-learning course in rural Alabama that engaged eighteenth-century laboring-class poetry. Stephen C. Behrendt recounts his use of Romantic era laboringclass poetry to explore cultural archaeology. Vincent Caretta discusses teaching a cross-listed History and English course on Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Numerous contributors, including Ellen L. O'Brien and Scarlet Bowen, share varieties of courses on literary production and...

Novel Technologies: The Holyrood Chapel Diorama in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Kirstyn Leuner, “Novel Technologies: The Holyrood Chapel Diorama in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (pp. 437–461) This essay argues that there is a diorama remediated within James Hogg’s experimental Scottish Gothic novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Invented in 1822, the diorama was a popular multimedia theater experience comprised of a mural-sized immersive and realistic painting as well as a printed booklet describing the scene. Together, the view and booklet imaginatively transport the diorama’s audience to the depicted location. The diorama in Hogg’s novel is Louis Daguerre’s “Ruins of Holyrood Chapel, a Moonlight Scene” (1823), which places the viewer within the crumbling abbey at Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, at night, among the tombs of Scottish nobles and royalty buried there. With its remediated Holyrood diorama, Confessions of a Justified Sinner prompts readers and characters, much like diorama-goers, to test their surroundings and determine where reality ends and the screen of illusion begins. Such reality-testing reveals characters’ and readers’ present moments to be part of, not detached from, the history of the ruined Holyrood Chapel and graveyard, the fractured identity of Scots, and the reception and retelling of their stories. Further, reality-testing draws attention to the media that construct one’s sense of self, the present, and the past, and these include not only the newer technology of the diorama, but also that of the novel in the late-Romantic period.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. <i> An English gothic novel in the context of moral philosophy<i>

The article is concerned with the unique ethical and aesthetic features of gothic fiction between the 18th and 19th centuries, and its representation in James Hogg’s novelThe Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Lofty ideals in the novels by A. Radcliff, M. G. Lewis, and C. Maturin often showed strong ties with moral philosophy (its concepts of benevolence, sin as the opposite of freedom, and sense and sensibility as the sources of virtue), permeating 18th-century discussions about morality along with reflections on the elevated and the picturesque. On the artistic plane of the gothic novel, these ideas create two principal oppositions, corresponding to ethical and aesthetic levels: ‘the natural and the unnatural’, and ‘freedom and non-freedom’. They are also present in Hogg’s novel, although represented in a different way. While the ‘natural/unnatural’ dichotomy is mostly a matter of changing the angle for the story’s perception (so that the reader might follow the events from the viewpoint of the pursuer rather than the pursued), though not without interesting aesthetic derivatives, the ‘freedom/non-freedom’ opposition marks a more modern aesthetical transition from the outside world to a fictional one.

Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age by Colin Jager

Reviewed by: Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age by Colin Jager Jessica Fay (bio) Colin Jager. Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 332. $75. Colin Jager’s Unquiet Things is a substantial, sweeping, ambitious book. The subject under discussion is nothing less than the condition of modernity itself: Jager’s exploration of the privatization of religion, the power of the state, and the effects of capitalism requires him to tackle historiography, hermeneutics, epistemology, and ontology; the strength and significance of this book, however, comes from the deep subtlety with which these weighty subjects are treated. Jager challenges the assumption that as modernity advances the presence (or “noise”) of religion is banished. The title, Unquiet Things, originates [End Page 339] from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” where a fluttering film in a grate is “the ‘sole unquiet thing’ in his otherwise silent house”; this fluttering contrasts with the extreme silence that “‘disturbs’ and ‘vexes’ meditation” (4). For Jager, silence is an analog for secularism, and the “unquiet thing” is the “residue” of religion (2). Jager’s purpose is to trace the means by which the “noise” of religion has been diminished and to listen out for frequencies at which its “disquiet” may yet be perceived in the secular age. The interpretation of Romantic literature in terms of secularization—which was initiated by M. H. Abrams and Earl Wasserman and later interrogated by critics such as Robert Ryan and Martin Priestman—is refashioned by Jager into an affective mould. Unquiet Things differs from historicist studies that isolate religion as “a set of cognitive beliefs or mental dispositions” (5). Jager begins with the premise that religion was transformed in the Enlightenment from a mysterious emotive phenomenon into a cognitive creedal one. One of the most original aspects of Unquiet Things, however, is its claim that the affective elements of religion dissipated into what Jager describes as the “mood” of modernity: he is concerned “less with religious dispute than with the atmosphere in which that dispute takes place—less with Coleridge’s flickering film than with the air currents that push it around” (26). This “atmosphere” or ambiance is not necessarily heard or seen but is felt and experienced. It is notable then that in his own prose Jager favors negative constructions, often introducing ideas via those which he considers less important (“I am less interested in X than in Y”) in a stylistic manifestation of the essence of the project; that is to say, one of the purposes of the book is to analyze something that is accessed indirectly, something that lurks in the background. As it offers a new way of thinking about where and how affective aspects of religion survive in the secular age, Unquiet Things will be relevant for scholars engaged with theories of affect and the history of the emotions, as well as those interested in Romanticism and religion. The scope, intricacy, and occasional opacity of Jager’s cumulative argument makes the lengthy introduction worthwhile. The monograph is divided into three Parts (“Reform,” “Sounding the Quiet,” and “After the Secular”), each consisting of three chapters. As Jager moves from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1817), literary texts are not always presented chronologically, though the reader is taken on a long journey of British history that includes Henry VIII’s “Act of Supremacy” (1534), the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), Union with Scotland, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic Age. Such a time span is necessary because the “background condition” (63) changes slowly. Approximately two thirds of the book is concerned with prose. One of the unexpected benefits offered to readers is a new interpretation of the [End Page 340] evolution of the novel. Working through Otranto, Austen’s Emma, Scott’s Waverly novels, and Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Jager situates the genre’s progression—from romance to realism—within the context of secularization. The juxtaposition of Otranto and Emma in chapters 2 and 3 announces Jager’s argument. The process of reform begun by Henry VIII involves a rejection of superstition, miraculous events, and enchantment in favor of a more...

Introduction to "Suicidal Romanticism: Origins and Influences"

Introduction to "Suicidal Romanticism:Origins and Influences" Michelle Faubert (bio) The essays in this issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination broaden the important conversation on suicide by providing newly recovered ways of thinking about it in relation to Romantic-era cultural forces, the prehistory of these ways of thinking, and their lasting effects.1 What marks this issue as unique amongst recent works on suicide is its breadth: it explores literature on suicide by men and women and in a range of genres from poetry to fiction to drama, and, while the main focus is on the Romantic period, it also makes reference to works on suicide from the Classical to the Modern period. Some unexpected writers are shown to be significant contributors to the concept of Romantic suicide, too; these include William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Herbert Lister, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Tennessee Williams. Moreover, the topic of suicide is paired with unusual forms and subjects here, including: the silver fork novel of the late-Romantic period; the Modern drama; religious enthusiasm; infanticide; incest; and interracial marriage. What the contributors to this issue demonstrate through these wide-ranging treatments is that the power—perhaps even the shock-value—of Romantic suicide made it a useful tool for a range of authors writing on vastly disparate topics. While many critical treatments of Romantic suicide have demonstrated how the topic was used as a political tool—to discuss human rights and protest slavery, gender inequality, and the confines of marriage for women2—several of the essays in this issue reveal the unexpected uses to which the topic was put in the literature of the period. The subject of suicide was of great official and popular concern to the British, who believed that they were uniquely afflicted with the propensity to kill themselves. However, the symbolic import of suicide was hotly contested in various texts of the Romantic era. For instance, in the Neoclassical mode and in some radical literature, suicide was lauded as heroic. It was also a popular element in the sometimes vapid, tear-jerking literature of Sensibility and tales of celebrity suicides, such as that of the young poet, Thomas Chatterton. In Gothic novels, such as James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, self-killers represent horror [End Page v] and utter sinfulness, and yet many other writers, following Robert Burton's influential Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, attribute suicidality to extreme religious devotion. Suicide could also convey revolution, the defiance of tyranny, and a defense of one's existential and bodily autonomy—all key characteristics of Romanticism as it has traditionally been defined. Nevertheless, by the end of the period, the legal understanding of suicide was linked almost invariably to victimhood, rather than to resistance: English courts found suicides to have been insane in over 97% of cases, a view that dominates today's understanding of suicide (Marsh 93). Given the various significances of suicide in the period, then, this issue does not make an attempt to flatten out these meanings into a single message, but, rather, it explores the subtleties and depths of the meanings of Romantic suicide, even as it considers the concepts—including ones from other eras—that shaped it, and those it helped to shape. In a sense, to focus on the influences and origins of ideas about suicide in Romantic-era texts, the theme of this issue of Studies in Literary Imagination is to search for the history of—even an explanation for—what is largely considered to be aberrant, unnatural, and perhaps what divides us from our fellow animals. In From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-killing in Classical Antiquity, Anton van Hooff asks, "Is man really placing himself outside nature by laying hands upon himself?" (10). Van Hooff goes on to relate Aristotle's tale of "a Scythian horse-breeder [who] tried to have a young stallion mate with its mother. The animal refused, but later it was cheated when the mare's head had been covered. Discovering the truth, it jumped into an abyss" (10). Aristotle's story implies that suicide is, indeed, natural—but it also implies that the incest taboo...

Calvinism, Enthusiasm, and Suicide: The Regulation of Subjectivity in the Romantic Period

Calvinism, Enthusiasm, and Suicide:The Regulation of Subjectivity in the Romantic Period Michelle Faubert (bio) Since the Renaissance period, Calvinism has been linked to suicide in the popular imaginary, even though it has always been unequivocal in condemning the act. This commonly held belief pronounces Calvinism as enthusiastic in Romantic-era terminology, or linked with religious madness, since suicide was almost always deemed to be caused by insanity by the turn of the nineteenth century (Marsh 93). Yet, recent historical research demonstrates the inaccuracy of the popular notion that Calvinists kill themselves more frequently than do members of the rest of the population. Thus, we must inquire into why this false belief has persisted for so long. It may not reflect a factual truth, but it endures because it clearly serves an ideological purpose. But what does this link signify? What cultural ideal does it serve, create, perpetuate? The literary world of the long nineteenth century provides important insight into the ideological function performed by the belief in suicidal Calvinism, which it helped to popularize. In what follows, I outline the historical contours of this myth, detail recent historians' study of it, and contribute to this investigation by examining two famous instances of Calvinistic suicide in the literary world: James Hogg's 1824 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and critical commentary upon William Cowper's biography. Through a close reading of another literary artifact from the period, Samuel Johnson's influential definition of "enthusiasm," I demonstrate that the common belief in Calvinistic suicide reflects a broad cultural interest in regulating subjectivity. I. The Regulation of Private Experience: Johnson's Enthusiasm and Rules for Reading At the same time that Enlightenment science advanced its goal of total observation into the mental realm through the new field of psychology,1 Calvinism, a highly individualistic faith, became identified with insanity. I suggest that Calvinism's emphasis on private communication with God, [End Page 79] which could not be regulated by external sources or experts, challenged the broad social movement towards total transparency and shared experience that was established principally by Enlightenment science and deployed throughout the religious, literary, and psychological realms. By linking Calvinism with insanity, Romantic-era culture divested it of legitimacy and labelled its form of subjectivity insignificant. The fear of unregulated, private experience is essential to Johnson's definition of enthusiasm, or religious insanity, which suggests that the concept functioned in part as an early means of enforcing ideological strictures regarding individuals' beliefs. Johnson's definition appears in his hugely influential text, A Dictionary of the English Language, the first "major English dictionary," according to Walter Jackson Bate (241). Focusing on the potential for the misinterpretation of God's word, the definition emphasizes the isolated nature of enthusiastic communication with the divine. Moreover, by seeking to distinguish real, acceptable forms of faith from false, insane approaches to God, Johnson's definition reveals its regulatory function. Citing John Locke as his source, Johnson defines enthusiasm as "A vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or communication. Enthusiasm is founded neither on reason nor divine revelation, but rises from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain" ("enthusiasm"). Johnsonian enthusiasm is the individual's private conviction that he or she fully understands God's word. Thus, the word enthusiasm represents a crisis of reading: it denotes unchecked interpretative hubris. Johnson also asserts that enthusiasm is "vain" and rises from the "conceits" of madness, both words suggesting excessive personal pride and mistakenness as integrally linked concepts. Understood in accordance with the "private" nature of enthusiasm, such "vain" "conceits" appear to be wrong precisely because of their interior, isolated nature. Although Johnson's definition attempts to establish popular notions of properly constituted faith mostly through negative means—by saying what faith is not ("vain," "private," "[un]reasonable")—the positive features of properly constituted faith are clear. This definition of enthusiasm implies that properly constituted belief is not private and that it is rightly subject to the judgment of others. Like the uncanny, what lies hidden—the subjective motions of faith—must come to light, must be externalized and put...

Echoes, Connections, Continuities: Bill Winnyford, James Robertson, and James Hogg in <i>The Testament of Gideon Mack</i>

This article looks to an engagement with canonical Scottish texts, explor - ing the intertextual resonances between James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006) and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Con - fessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Murchison explores the playful and multiple connections between the two texts, offering both elucidation of the twenty-first century text and new ways of approaching Hogg’s novel and the tradition to which it belongs.

A Lacanian Reading of the Two Novels The Scarlet Letter And Private Memoirs And Confessions of A Justified Sinner

This paper discusses two novels The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and The Scarlet Letter written by James Hogg and Nathaniel Hawthorn from the perspective of Jacques Lacan theories: the mirror stage, the-name-of-the-father and desire. The mirror stage refers to historical value and an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image. The-name-of-the-father is defined as the prohibitive role of the father as the one who lays down the incest taboo in the Oedipus complex. Meanwhile, desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.Keywords: Lacanian Reading; The Mirror Stage; The-Name-Of-The-Father And Desire

A Lacanian Reading of the Two Novels The Scarlet Letter And Private Memoirs And Confessions of A Justified Sinner

This paper discusses two novels The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and The Scarlet Letter written by James Hogg and Nathaniel Hawthorn from the perspective of Jacques Lacan theories: the mirror stage, the-name-of-the-father and desire. The mirror stage refers to historical value and an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image. The-name-of-the-father is defined as the prohibitive role of the father as the one who lays down the incest taboo in the Oedipus complex. Meanwhile, desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.

Avatars in Edinburgh: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the Second Life of Hogg’s Ettrick Shepherd

In this essay, I deploy the contemporary technical term avatar to interpret the functions of “the Ettrick Shepherd,” a character associated with James Hogg that originated in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and appears subsequently in Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The notorious difficulty of Sinner, I argue, is due in part to the movement of the Shepherd, as an avatar, from one textual realm to another in a way that reveals the limits of meaning making in synthetic landscapes. I show how reading the Shepherd as an avatar furthers our understanding of the novel’s engagement with Blackwood’s, as well as the experience of readers in Romantic-era Edinburgh, whose literary culture thrived on dynamic representations of and relationships between people in print.

Meeting Ground: Considering the Place, Value and Choice of Comparative Literature

A personal account of Morgan's graduate work on Canadian and Australian women’s settlement writing...both published novels and private memoirs, written between the mid-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries by middle-class women.

Twins, Twinship, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Twins, Twinship, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Emily A. Bernhard Jackson (bio) It would seem that there is nothing left to say about Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Over the last century, the text has been read as a moral allegory, a reflection of colonial and class fears, an expression of panic about homosexuality and masturbation, an economic parable, and a case study tied to Victorian psychology and brain science: it appears this particular potion has been drunk dry.1 One ingredient, however, remains unmeasured. Despite the fact that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde makes explicit reference to twins when Jekyll, contemplating evil and good, regrets “that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continually struggling” (49), no critic has linked Stevenson’s divided-yet-connected doubles to the phenomenon of twinship. Yet, as scholars have acknowledged, Stevenson was extremely interested in science, and the nineteenth century saw the inception of the science of gemellology (twin studies) by Francis Galton, whose work he admired. Moreover, as a lifelong invalid, Stevenson had regular contact with the medical books and ideas that contained and generated nineteenth-century beliefs about twins. In fact, both gemellology and medical twin beliefs play an important role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not only influencing the novella as a text in its own right, but also refiguring its relationship to nationalism and to Stevenson himself. There has been considerable scholarly discussion of the implications of doubles and doubling in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and at first glance, it may be difficult to see how a discussion of twins differs from this.2 Doubles, however, are both a supernatural and an inexact phenomenon: their duplication suggests something supernatural, or they are supernatural beings who make themselves identical for a purpose, thematic or otherwise. (Perhaps the most obvious example is found in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.) At the same time, literary doubles are not necessarily physically identical, but are made and recognized to be symbolically identical. Twins, on the other hand, are actually identical, without attached symbolism.3 They thus are not a symbol but rather come to be invested with symbolism: doubles impress symbolism upon a text, but symbols rise out of the fact of twinship. My goal in this article is to see what kinds of symbolism arose around twinship in sources that might have influenced Stevenson, and to examine how they play out in, enhance, and widen our understanding of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. [End Page 70] Twins were far from a rare phenomenon in nineteenth-century Britain. To begin with, conjoined twins of various kinds were a staple of the hugely popular Victorian freak shows that toured the nation. The promoters of these shows plastered the towns they visited with posters and handbills; when Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins, first visited Edinburgh in 1830, for example, their manager exhausted his advertising budget promoting their appearance. The “exhibits” received more mainstream consideration, as well. “Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy” was the subject of two articles in the British Medical Journal (Tromp 167), and on the Bunkers’ second visit, from 1868–69, their case was written up in the same journal by Sir James Young Simpson (Wallace et al. 95, 265), Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University, where nineteen-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson was a bored engineering student (Harman 42). Such scientific consideration of freaks legitimated them, making their Victorian gawkers feel less like sensationalist voyeurs; perhaps equally important to the displayed and their managers, the learned articles also brought them to the attention of a wider public. In fact, such twins had been a source of lively popular interest in Great Britain since at least the sixteenth century. The first recorded set of conjoined twins made their appearance at the court of James IV of Scotland in 1508; they are variously reported to have been joined at the thigh, sharing one pair of legs, or connected elsewhere, each with his own pair of arms and legs (Fiedler 201). Over the next century...

Bad Taste, Gothic Bodies, and Subversive Aesthetics in Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Contemporary reviews of Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner attack the author's taste and decorum, filtering their language through culinary metaphors that conflate aesthetic discrimination with the embodied act of consumption. The reviewers, however, fail to recognize how the novel issues a challenge to culturally dominant notions of taste, policed in literary periodicals as a symptom of class anxiety. Hogg interrogates the linking of good taste to authenticity, cerebral apprehension, and delicacy, whereas bad taste is linked to inauthenticity, bodily sensations, and excessive affect. Hogg's novel filters this commentary on taste through a pattern of sensuous overdescription, a fractured narrative structure, the conflation of bodies and texts, and a necrophilic Editor with a case of textual indigestion, elements that reviewers fail to read within the discursive context of Hogg's ongoing engagement with the Blackwood's circle on questions of taste and class identity.

The Virtues of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Marital Infidelity in Marie-Jeanne Roland’s <i>Mémoires particuliers</i> (1795)

M a r i e J e a n n e r o l a n d i s c o n s i d e r e d the first French woman autobiographer in the modern sense, a distinction earned by the unusual openness to sexual revelation exhibited in her Memoires particuliers (Private memoirs), written in the prisons of the Terror during the French Revolution and left unfinished when its author was guillotined on 8 November 1793. Born in 1754, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon had enjoyed a bourgeois existence as an only child in Paris. Her father was a skilled engraver, and her parents provided her with an excellent education that included private tutors. While her marriage to the intellectually gifted Jean-Marie Roland gave her access to the company of a number of fascinating if minor figures of the French Enlightenment, it was the upheaval of the Revolution that made Roland herself a public figure. Her work behind the scenes as a speech and letter writer and overall advisor for her husband’s Girondin Party became a source of scandal in the revolutionary press when the Girondin delegates to the National Assembly were attacked for attempting to foil the will of the people by avoiding a vote on the execution of King louis XVI in the National Assembly. Once associated with Robespierre and considered representatives of the far left wing of the Revolution, the Girondins were recast as royalist anti-Republicans,

Antinomian Reviewers: Hogg's Critique of Romantic-era Magazine Culture in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner

In recent years a number historically minded critics have construed portions James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions a Justified Sinner as a loosely allegorical expression the author's uneasy and ungentle relationship with the print culture Romantic-era Edinburgh, and especially with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (See Duncan, Fanaticism and Scott's Shadow; Fang 66-104; Mack; Richardson lxvii). This was the periodical that for some time gave that rural, working-class outsider a public voice but that later hijacked and travestied that same voice for the sake its own pretentions to cultural prestige. My object is not to quarrel with these readings but rather to expand them in a new direction. What has largely been absent from previous attempts to read Confessions a Justified Sinner as a coded account Hogg's painfully ambivalent relationship with the great literary periodicals his era is, on the one hand, something central to his novel--the specific doctrines Antinomianism--and something definitional about magazines Blackwood's ilk: the savagely partisan-political nature their review-articles concerning contemporary literature. It is my contention that by viewing the former as an implicit critique the latter, we will discover that Hogg's assessment Romantic-era literary criticism is both wider and sharper than it has yet been credited as being. For while it is well known that in writing Justified Sinner Hogg was taking a swing at his Tory friends and...persecutors in the Blackwood's group (Campbell 181), it has not yet been appreciated that his most telling jab originated in the heretical religious tenets his deluded protagonist, and that the blow was aimed squarely at the ideological extremism the nation's cultural gatekeepers, both those he knew personally and those farther afield. As we shall see, in Hogg's hands Antinomianism becomes a metaphorical weapon by means which he critiques two intimately related practices Romantic periodicals: intemperate denunciations the literary productions those organs' perceived ideological foes, and shameless puffing the works their political allies and personal friends. When we remember that it was an allegorical work--the Manuscript--that first brought Hogg to national attention, and that he was fond touting the impact upon readers of [his] celebrated allegories (Letters 363, Miller 224), it should not surprise us that his most enduring text contains allegorical elements, or that recognizing them should help untangle some Justified Sinner's notorious obstacles to coherent interpretation. When read in this light, Hogg's novel emerges as a rebus-like rendering the ethical temptations that chronically beset writers literary criticism at the dawn mass-circulation journalism. We must commence with a brief review some familiar facts, the first among them being James Hogg's key role in shepherding (the pun is inevitable) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine safely through its difficult birth in 1817. Its owner and publisher, William Blackwood, had wished to found a Tory periodical that would stand as a rival to the Whig-directed Edinburgh Review, but the first issue his new venture proved unpopular with the public, and the pair editors Blackwood originally engaged proved not to share his zealous Toryism (Schoenfield, British Periodicals 217-18). After intensifying disputes with Blackwood, these editors jumped ship in favor a Whig publication and Blackwood hired in their places John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, talented if arrogant and choleric literary figures under whose leadership the magazine would eventually enjoy immense cultural influence. Hogg wrote a satirical sketch a clef about the contentious change editorial personnel entitled Translation an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript which, though it involved the infant magazine in several lawsuits, got it off to a magnificent start in terms circulation numbers. …