Hogg grew up in rural Ettrick Forest in a notable family of tradition-bearers, and in his first major poetry collection The Mountain Bard of 1807 he claims his rightful position at the centre of that culture. Whereas Scott collected the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Hogg was the sole author of The Mountain Bard. He learned to negotiate the erudite print culture of Edinburgh with the literary ballad, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by his powerful friend, shifting the shape of his earlier manuscript and periodical poems accordingly. Then in 1821, when he was an established literary...

Set in early 18th century Scotland, this novel recounts the corruption of a boy of strict Calvinist upbringing by a mysterious stranger under whose influence he commits a series of murders. Could this stranger be a figment of the imagination, or the devil himself?

After Scott's death in 1832 James Hogg wrote an affectionate but frank account of their long friendship. Scott's son-in-law and official biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, declared himself to be filled with 'utter disgust and loathing' at the 'beastly and abominable things' he found it to contain.This edition includes both the original version, written as a contribution to a Scott biography planned by a young London friend of Hogg's, and a revised version created subsequently for an American market. Those with an interest in Romantic biography and autobiography will be particularly fascinated...

Hogg left a written record of three of his many journeys to the Highlands, those of 1802, 1803 and 1804, and in Highland Journeys he offers a thoughtful and deeply-felt response to the Highland Clearances. He gives vivid pictures of his experiences, including a narrow escape from a Navy press-gang, and a Sacrament day with one minister preaching in English and another in Gaelic. Hogg also explains aspects of Gaelic culture such as the waulking songs, and he describes the trade in kelp, lucrative to the landowners but back-breaking and ill-paid for the workers. Highland Journeys makes a...

Hogg played a significant role in the success and notoriety of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which was founded in 1817 by the Edinburgh publisher and bookseller, William Blackwood. Hogg's relationships with Blackwood, the magazine, and the major contributors were central to both his literary and personal life. From 1817 until his death in 1835 he published more than one hundred works in 'Maga', as the magazine came to be known among the contributors, and wrote perhaps another forty for the magazine that were not published there. His contributions showcase the diversity of his talent and his...

Written in 1832 but only published in 1836, after Hogg's death, this was the culmination of Hogg's lifetime interest in Burns's poetry and life. This edition contains comments Hogg made on individual Burns poems and songs in the annotations to the 'Hogg-Motherwell Works of Robert Burns' volumes.

A TLS International Book of the Year(TLS, Dec 7, 2001)This now-famous book was given a hostile reception when it first appeared in 1824. It was not reprinted until the late 1830s, when a heavily bowdlerised version was included in a posthumous edition of Hogg's collected Tales and Sketches published by Blackie & Son of Glasgow. Thereafter Confessions of a Justified Sinner attracted little interest until the 1890s, when the unbowdlerised text was printed for the first time since the 1820s. However, the current high reputation of Hogg's novel did not fully begin to establish itself until 1947,...

In this collection of short stories Hogg focuses on the Scottish civil war of 1644-45, in which the Marquis of Montrose led his royalist forces in a series of stunning victories against the odds before his final defeat at Philiphaugh. Each of Hogg's five tales centres on one of the five major battles of Montrose's brilliant but ultimately futile campaign. Each tale is utterly different from the others in genre and tone, but taken together they build up a composite picture of what it was like to experience the 'anarchy and confusion' of the time at first hand. The importance of Tales of the...

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...