This volume is edited by Douglas S. Mack and contains an Essay on the Illustrations by Meiko O'Halloran and a Glossary by Janette CurrieThe Queen's Wake is one of the landmarks of British Romantic poetry. It focuses on the return of Mary, Queen of Scots to Scotland in 1561 to take personal rule of her kingdom after her years in France. In the poem poets and bards hold a poetic competition (a 'wake') in Holyrood Palace to welcome the Queen home. In the descriptions of the songs and the people who sing them various Scottish poets of Hogg's own period can be recognised, giving the reader a sense...

Hogg was a superb letter-writer, and this is the initial volume of the first collected edition of his letters (to be completed in three volumes). Many of the letters have never been published before, or published only in part. They vividly reflect Hogg's varied social experience and shed new light on his own writings and those of his contemporaries. Among his famous correspondents were writers such as Scott, Byron, and Southey, antiquarians such as Robert Surtees, politicians such as Sir Robert Peel, and editors and publishers such as John Murray, William Blackwood, and Robert Chambers. But...

This volume is edited by Douglas S. Mack and contains an Essay on the Illustrations by Meiko O'Halloran and a Glossary by Janette CurrieThe Queen's Wake is one of the landmarks of British Romantic poetry. It focuses on the return of Mary, Queen of Scots to Scotland in 1561 to take personal rule of her kingdom after her years in France. In the poem poets and bards hold a poetic competition (a 'wake') in Holyrood Palace to welcome the Queen home. In the descriptions of the songs and the people who sing them various Scottish poets of Hogg's own period can be recognised, giving the reader a sense...

James Hogg is one of the acknowledged masters of the short story. Some of his best stories appeared in The Shepherd's Calendar, a work of the 1820s in which he sets out to re-create on paper the manner and the content of the traditional oral storytelling of Ettrick Forest, the remote and mountainous sheep-farming district in which he grew up. Like Hogg's masterpiece The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, several of the stories from The Shepherd's Calendar deal disturbingly and hauntingly with the supernatural, and explore psychological depths with a remarkable insight and...

Commentators once dismissed Perils of Woman as a bad book because it trampled on the flowerbeds of early-nineteenth-century decorum; they now acclaim it a masterpiece for the very same reason, reading subversive craft in the place of oafishness.' Ian Duncan, Studies in Hogg and his World'Both stories of The Three Perils of Woman] are generically diverse, self-consciously impure. Hogg described them as 'domestic tales', apparently soliciting a female readership whose delicacy he then assaults with speculations about promiscuity and prostitution, and with prayers so chattily informal that...