When James Hogg published The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in 1824, it was a critical moment in the author’s career. Although Hogg had made a name for himself as a poet and essayist, Edinburgh’s elite literary circles were less inclined to grant that a self-taught shepherd could successfully write novels. Hogg pinned his hopes on Confessions, only to be disappointed by sluggish sales and the bewilderment of critics who could not account for the novel’s contradictions and ambiguities. Few could have predicted that the novel would, like the corpse of its protagonist, surface after many years, this time to an audience more prepared to appreciate its strangeness.

The convention's theme, “Celebration: Joy and Sorrow” is a fitting lens through which to commemorate a novel about doppelgängers; one that revels in the lived traditions of Scottish folklore while signaling its resistance to a post-Union, British hegemony; and that structurally and narratively insists on the multiplicity of interpretation. Everything, Hogg’s novel insists, has (at least) two sides. If Walter Scott’s Waverley novels exemplify Romanticism’s tendency to artifactualize the past in order to construct a progressive narrative of modernity, Confessions is a useful example of the fragility of that project.

Confessions was rescued from obscurity by Andre Gide, whose rapturous introduction to the novel’s 1947 reissue touches on many of the reasons for its international influence on postmodern literature. But a small, if influential, coterie of writers has long recognized Hogg’s regional significance. Using language prefiguring Gide’s, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that Confessions “haunted and puzzled him” because it echoed a story he had heard before, the memory of which was both suppressed and reawakened by reading the novel. The deeply Scottish resonances of Hogg’s novel have been the inspiration for a range of contemporary Scottish literature, most explicitly seen in the recent explosion of “Tartan Noir.”

The “Hogg/neo-Hogg” panel is composed of four papers. Two deepen our understanding of the novel’s historical and philosophical investments. The other two papers trace the significance of Hogg’s colonial critique to contemporary Scottish literature. Together, the panel reflects Confessions as a novel of and ahead of its time.

Gary Dyer’s essay “Paranoid Gothic, the Spy System, and Entrapment in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” begins with the premise that writers in the Romantic period were committed to the idea of there being a deep, essential self and to the belief—even fear—that this self would be discoverable by others. Dyer’s argument is that the paranoid Gothic elements of this novel connote the activities of informers in Hogg’s Scotland. The novel dramatizes the ability of the informer to draw out a person’s tendencies, whether those tendencies are understood in terms of the doctrine of predestination or a more secular doctrine of natural character.

Expanding Dyer’s analysis of the Gothic, Alexander Millen’s paper, “James Robertson’s Hoggish Testament,” analyzes The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), which follows the career of its titular hero, a Scottish clergyman, who meets the devil. Often described as paying homage to Hogg’s Confessions, Robertson’s novel fuses Hogg’s Gothic skepticism with healthy doubts about American cultural, political and economic hegemony. Paying particular attention to Robertson’s use of Hogg-like frame narrative, this paper reads The Testament of Gideon Mack’s fusion of the satirical force of Hogg with the romance of Scott as a critique of American and British exceptionalism in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Liam Rockall’s essay “James Hogg and the Divisive Genealogy of Moral Philosophy from Locke to Godwin,” argues that James Hogg inherits a tension in ethics from previous moral philosophers, which he recontextualizes as social and psychological divisions in Confessions. Rockall traces these divisions to a shift in moral sentiments during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hogg, Rockall argues, illustrates a separation in Robert’s “great indignation against all the wicked of the world” and the contrast between objective and subjective perspectives of his madness.

Alex Dick’s essay, “Hogg’s Confessions, Tartan Noir, and the Ambiguities of Race,” argues that Hogg’s novel thematizes the persistent ambiguities of race, of “whiteness” and its complex historical and phenomenological relations with “blackness” in Scottish fiction. Critical race studies tend to associate whiteness with “control” and “comfort” both determined and haunted by a fear of blackness; in Scottish literature whiteness is constituted by an existential embrace of otherness that simultaneously highlights and erases the political and economic truths of racial difference. Dick tracks contemporary resonances of this doubleness in a range of contemporary novels and television series.