the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner analysis

His characters find themselves drawn nostalgically to the superstitious Highlands and the Romantic dream of an independent Scotland, but ultimately learn to value the practical rewards of the then-recent Union with the British.

Scott's Waverley novels, such as Redgauntlet (1824), ground his fiction in a history that embraces Scotland's profitable nineteenth-century present of commerce and empire while sadly but plainly rejecting its separate heroic and supernatural past. Scott's apparent rejection of the fantastic instead conserves its affect in order to negatively define rational modernity Hogg turns Scott's argument around by asserting what might be called a supernatural modernity, the radical embracing of the literary supernatural as a haunting, as a discredited past that will nevertheless not stay buried but rises up to make unignorable claims on the present and to reveal the necessary self-deceptions that underwrite the possibility of modern subjectivity at all.

Ultimately, these writers represent together two sides of an argument about the purpose of the fantastic in the emerging Romantic novel as it responds to the dislocations of early nineteenth-century cultural transformations. However, despite differences, the fantastic is not less important for Scott than for Hogg, only deployed differently, indicating a more moderate politics and poetics of the supernatural. Initially, the fantastic, the literature of the unreal or of the supernatural as exploded belief, appears to be more important to Hogg's work than to Scott's. Indeed, they appear to inhabit two seemingly separate literary worlds: contemporary and metropolitan Edinburgh after the Scottish Enlightenment (Scott) and the rural border regions steeped in a vanishing culture of folklore and fairy tales (Hogg). Scott and Hogg chart very different courses, however, between skeptical modernity and the supposed supernatural past. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Scottish writers Walter Scott and his sometime protege James Hogg employ the fantastic to reveal the relationship of the supernatural past to modern identity and nationality.

The private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner analysis