{"id":1115,"date":"2016-03-08T01:44:11","date_gmt":"2016-03-08T01:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1115"},"modified":"2016-03-08T01:44:11","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T01:44:11","slug":"five-questions-meiko-ohalloran-on-james-hogg-and-british-romanticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1115","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Meiko O\u2019Halloran on James Hogg and British Romanticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Meiko<\/a><\/p>\n

Meiko O\u2019Halloran is a Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Newcastle University<\/a>.\u00a0 She has published articles and book chapters on writers including Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Joanna Baillie and touching on topics including borders and boundaries, the theatre, poetic self-fashioning, cosmic ascents and illustration.\u00a0 At the centre of her network of interests is James Hogg, the subject of her first monograph, James Hogg and British Romanticism: A Kaleidoscopic Art<\/em><\/a>, which was published last year by Palgrave Macmillan.\u00a0 Below, we discuss her book in the contexts of her long engagement with Hogg, his positions and his legacies.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in James Hogg and his works?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My interest in Hogg began when I read The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner<\/em> the summer before my second year as an undergraduate at UCL.\u00a0 The narrative was riveting and I thought the idea of telling it twice from different points of view was ingenious.\u00a0 The changing narrative lenses and the open-endedness of the novel made it fascinatingly indeterminate.\u00a0 It\u2019s a novel that forces you to think for yourself and I found that incredibly exciting.<\/p>\n

I wrote an essay on the Confessions<\/em> at the start of term and listened with great excitement to Karl Miller\u2019s lecture on Hogg; Karl had retired, but he taught a series of seminars on Romantic-era fiction that year which I felt privileged to attend.\u00a0 When I later decided to write a longer research essay on Hogg, John Sutherland suggested I ask Karl\u2019s advice.\u00a0 The first volumes of the Stirling\/South Carolina edition of The Collected Works of James Hogg<\/em> had recently been published and I wanted to write on several of Hogg\u2019s works of fiction.\u00a0 Hearing Karl talking inside his office at the time of our appointed meeting, I politely waited until he\u2019d finished speaking before nervously knocking at the door.\u00a0 I was startled when he asked, from his chaise longue, why I was twenty minutes late and revealed that he\u2019d expected me to interrupt his phone conversation with Christopher Ricks!\u00a0 After quizzing me on why I\u2019d chosen an author who is so difficult to write about, he eventually conceded that I “might have something to say” and advised me to focus on the Confessions<\/em>.\u00a0 I got a pass to the British Library reading room (then in the British Museum) and began my research.\u00a0 Karl was kind enough to take an interest in reading my essay after I graduated, and over the next seventeen years, we became friends.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d planned to include Hogg\u2019s work in my proposed Oxford MPhil thesis on Romantic Outcasts, but when the time came, Hogg didn\u2019t seem to fit in!\u00a0 I abandoned the outcasts and, with Fiona Stafford\u2019s encouragement, decided to concentrate on developing my understanding of Hogg\u2019s fiction instead.\u00a0 This paved the way for my DPhil.\u00a0 Little did I realise that my graduate research would eventually lead me to argue for Hogg\u2019s inclusion in and centrality to British Romanticism.<\/p>\n

2) How did you come to settle on the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for the kinds of art which Hogg produced?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Changeability is a feature of nearly all Hogg\u2019s works\u2014in his handling of literary form, genre, voice, and so on.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t until I returned to the Confessions<\/em> to write about it in my DPhil thesis that I was struck by its kaleidoscopic qualities\u2014in the multiple interpretative possibilities that are opened and the startling effects produced on readers\u2019 sympathies by continuously shifting the narrative lens.\u00a0 The most impressive shape-shifter in the novel, Gil-Martin, is said to have the \u2018cameleon art\u2019 [sic] of changing his appearance; it seemed to me that the novel also reconfigures its identity continuously, and that Hogg himself demonstrates an enjoyment of shape-shifting across his literary career\u2014through his bold experiments with literary form and by playing with his own identities, as well as creating protean characters in his works.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, I found that Hogg had been friends with David Brewster, a fellow Borderer from Scotland, who had invented the kaleidoscope at a time when they were both living in Edinburgh.\u00a0 I learnt more about the features which made Brewster\u2019s invention a sensation all over Europe in the late 1810s.\u00a0 I had no idea that Brewster\u2019s kaleidoscope was so sophisticated.\u00a0 Its most distinctive feature was the huge array of choices it gave viewers.\u00a0 It was up to each viewer to choose how to assemble the kaleidoscope (in its \u2018simple\u2019, polyangular, annular, parallel, polycentral, or stereoscopic forms) and to select what items to put in the viewing cell at one end (these could include beads, glass, coloured fluids, spun thread, or painted images).\u00a0 If the objects in the cell were loose, the kaleidoscope could produce an infinite number of images, making each viewing unique.\u00a0 Viewers were also encouraged to experiment with looking at objects outside the instrument, using the kaleidoscope in its telescopic or microscopic modes.\u00a0 Hogg was fascinated by optical science\u2014as seen in his dramatic use of the Brocken Spectre at Arthur\u2019s Seat in the Confessions<\/em>\u2014but it\u2019s the unpredictability of his genre-mixing and the range of interpretative choices he gives readers that makes the kaleidoscope such a fitting analogy.<\/p>\n

Brewster\u2019s kaleidoscope offers a model from Hogg\u2019s day that foregrounds the flexibility and endless creativity that characterises him as a writer.\u00a0 It\u2019s tremendously helpful for reassessing Hogg\u2019s work as both a maker and a viewer of Romantic literary culture.\u00a0 The idea of a \u2018kaleidoscopic\u2019 literary practice helps us to understand Hogg\u2019s radical literary aesthetic\u2014his creation of textual spaces in which readers can exercise choice and play with their perceptions.\u00a0 But the kaleidoscope is also wonderfully apt for defining Hogg\u2019s art because in the act of turning the kaleidoscope, the reflections of the objects being viewed are continually realigned so that the viewer sees what was peripheral becoming central and what was central being moved to the periphery.\u00a0 Hogg, who was (and is still) often regarded as a “minor” or “marginal” writer, not only shakes up, plays with, and juxtaposes existing literary genres and traditions, but also re-focalises readers\u2019 attention through a range of narrative perspectives, some of which involve placing himself at the centre of his works.\u00a0 He repeatedly repositions himself and his readers in relation to his texts in ways that force us to reassess our views.<\/p>\n

3) What do you think are the main insights that can be gained through situating Hogg as a central figure in British Romanticism?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hogg positions himself centrally in The Poetic Mirror, or The Living Bards of Britain<\/em> (1816), and invites us to examine an emerging Romantic poetic canon both from the inside and the outside.\u00a0 Crucially, here, as elsewhere, he is a critical viewer as well as a maker of literary culture.\u00a0 Through his kaleidoscopic unsettling of readers\u2019 perceptions of what is central and peripheral, his self-positioning invites us to reconsider British Romanticism itself; with Hogg at the centre of the picture, it looks more miscellaneous, expansive, and dynamically unpredictable.<\/p>\n

Hogg was widely known in the Romantic marketplace as the author of The Queen\u2019s Wake<\/em> (1813) and many short stories, and the Ettrick Shepherd of the \u2018Noctes Ambrosianae\u2019 in Blackwood\u2019s Edinburgh Magazine<\/em>.\u00a0 By returning him to a central place in his era, we see that his inventiveness and playfulness are absolutely part of the wider Romantic practice of genre-mixing\u2014and that, like William Blake, he is one of the most exciting and daring genre-mixers of them all.\u00a0 Given that Hogg is experimenting with literary form in more invigorating and extreme ways than many of the poets in Stuart Curran\u2019s Poetic Form and British Romanticism<\/em> (1986) or other genre-mixers in David Duff\u2019s fascinating Romanticism and the Uses of Genre<\/em> (2009), it becomes clear that his work deserves substantial attention in critical accounts of Romantic formal experimentation.<\/p>\n

Resituating Hogg as a central figure in British Romanticism also enables us to examine a much broader array of his intertextual relationships.\u00a0 While it\u2019s wonderful that he is now recognised as a major figure in Scottish Romanticism, there\u2019s still a critical tendency to compare him with his most \u201cproximate\u201d models, Burns and Scott, or to pigeonhole the Confessions<\/em> as a defiant reaction to the manipulation of his identity in Blackwood\u2019s<\/em>.\u00a0 This critical mould tends to emphasise Hogg as a rebellious victim of the literary marketplace rather than an inventive and willing player in it, in a way that can misrepresent or reduce his creative achievement.\u00a0 Examining the distinctive, kaleidoscopic quality of his work puts him into productive dialogue as well as dispute with many of his more famous contemporaries, and opens up our understanding of his agency, his flexible self-positioning as an author, and his deft use of a plethora of literary traditions.\u00a0 I explore his responses to major English as well as Scottish writers, because the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sterne was demonstrably as important and stimulating to his imagination as, say, that of Macpherson, Burns, and Scott, or Byron, who was half Scottish.<\/p>\n

4) Which particular works by Hogg \u2013 beyond the obvious Confessions of a Justified Sinner<\/em> \u2013 would you recommend to scholars seeking to incorporate insights from his works into undergraduate and taught postgraduate courses?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My top recommendation is The Poetic Mirror<\/em> which includes Hogg\u2019s parodies of Wordsworth and Coleridge and is brilliant for discussing canon-making and the tensions and competiveness that are part of that process.\u00a0 It would be great to teach alongside the Smith brothers\u2019 Rejected Addresses<\/em>, Byron\u2019s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers<\/em>, or Leigh Hunt\u2019s The Feast of Poets<\/em>, for example.\u00a0 I think Hogg\u2019s witty mock epic about ancient Scotland, Queen Hynde<\/em> (1824), would be fantastic to teach alongside Don Juan<\/em> and other Romantic appropriations of the epic.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found that undergraduates and postgraduates learn a lot from reading The Pilgrims of the Sun<\/em> (1815) in dialogue with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<\/em> and Queen Mab<\/em> due to its use of otherworld journeys, pantheistic ideas, and syncretic methods.<\/p>\n

Students who are interested in pursuing Hogg\u2019s experimental narrative techniques beyond the Confessions<\/em> should read Tales of the Wars of Montrose<\/em> (1835), which is fascinatingly rich and surprisingly critically neglected; the EUP edition is available in paperback<\/a>, which is helpful for teaching purposes.\u00a0 Lots of the stories in The Shepherd\u2019s Calendar<\/em> (1829) and Winter Evening Tales<\/em> (1820) are also full of unexpected narrative techniques and many of them draw on rural superstition and folklore in a way that\u2019s illuminating to consider in relation to urban magazine culture, the rise of the short story, and the Gothic.\u00a0 The Three of Perils of Woman<\/em> (1823) is well worth studying for ideas of nationhood, the treatment of history, and formal innovation in the novel.<\/p>\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My new book project examines how Romantic poets reconceptualised the role of the poet and the social value of poetry, using imagined places and otherworld journeys to confront real-world issues.\u00a0 I explore how, in picking up the mantle of first-generation poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, poets who included Shelley, Hogg, Keats, and Byron sought to sustain a radicalism of form and imagination by reconnecting with a longer poetic ancestry\u2014which included epic forefathers, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, as well as popular ballads of supernatural abduction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meiko O\u2019Halloran is a Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Newcastle University.\u00a0 She has published articles and book chapters on writers including Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Joanna Baillie and touching… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1119,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions\/1119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}