Altrive Tales

by James Hogg, Gillian Hughes (Editor)

Overview

Altrive Tales was carefully prepared by Hogg in 1832 as the opening volume in a planned twelve-volume collected prose fiction series, intended as the culmination of his career as a storyteller. It opens with his own story of how a ragged servant-lad remade himself as a respected professional writer, the associate of Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth and Galt. Hogg's frank and humorous 'Memoir of the Author's Life' is widely recognised as a classic of Romantic autobiography and an important record of early nineteenth-century Scottish culture. Hogg's sharp eye for the latest publishing phenomena and pawky self-mocking humour is evident in his awareness of Altrive Tales as a contribution to the monthly-volume classic fiction series of the early 1830s following Sir Walter Scott's magnum opus edition of the Waverley Novels. Frankly pleading guilty to the egotism of presenting his own output to the world as a literary classic Hogg engagingly confesses, 'I like to write about myself: in fact, there are few

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748618934
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	07/11/2003
Series:	The Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Gillian Hughes, Independent Scholar, has been a General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, and is currently an advisory editor for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry and for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. She has published critical editions of works by each of these writers, and also a biography of James Hogg.

Editorial Reviews

This is a fascinating volume, full of surprises, challenges and confirmations … Gillian Hughes' editorial activities are exemplary: the textual decisions and apparatus inspire confidence and assent, and the genesis of the Tales is pieced together in an introduction which is a serious piece of scholarly detecitve work in its own right…she offers finely-observed, stimulating exegiesis which will encourage further readings, and the explanatory notes offer some wonderfully suggestive analogies. Alltogether, the volume is a revelation. There is a very strong case for its reissue in a paperback accessible to students.

From the Publisher

A necessary and commendable effort to present... [Hogg's] entire corpus in a welcome research edition.

Scotia - Rhona Brown

A necessary and commendable effort to present... [Hogg's] entire corpus in a welcome research edition.

— Rhona Brown

Scotia: Interdisciplinary Journal of Scottish Studies

A necessary and commendable effort to present... [Hogg's] entire corpus in a welcome research edition.

— Rhona Brown

Scotia