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 man, he published a revised edition in keeping with his new professional status as Author of The Queen's Wake. The present edition prints together, for the first time, the surviving pre-1807 versions of poems included in The Mountain Bard, the full 1807 collection, and the complete 1821 version. The Introduction (besides giving a full history of this complex, changing work) places it firmly within the eighteenth-century antiquarian projects of ballad-collecting and the intellectual currents of Romanticism, in particular the literary vogue for the ballad shown in works such as Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Available in Paperback: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified SinnerThe Shepherd's CalendarTales of the Wars of MontroseThe Three Perils of WomanWinter Evening TalesAnecdotes of ScottThe Queen's WakeAltrive TalesAlso Available in Hardback: A Queer BookThe Shepherd's CalendarThe Three Perils of WomanTales of the Wars of MontroseLay SermonsQueen HyndeAnecdotes of ScottThe SpyThe Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified SinnerThe Jacobite Relics of Scotland (First Series)The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (Second Series)Winter Evening TalesThe Queen's WakeAltrive TalesThe Collected Letters of James Hogg, Volume 1, 1800-1819
About the Author:

James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. He is best known for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Suzanne Gilbert, senior lecturer in English at Stirling University, publishes on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish literature, ballads, and chapbooks. She and Ian Duncan are general editors of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of The Collected Works of James Hogg (Edinburgh University Press), for which she co-edited Queen Hynde (1998) and edited The Mountain Bard (2007). Her edition of Hogg's Scottish Pastorals for the series is forthcoming.