James Hogg and British Romanticism

"The book argues for Hogg's centrality to British Romanticism, resituating his work in relation to Romantic contemporaries who include Byron, Blake, Scott, Baillie, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Keats, and tracing his important inter-textual relationships to predecessors such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Johnson, Sterne, Gray, Collins, Macpherson, and Burns. Hogg creates a unique literary style which, the author argues, is best described as 'kaleidoscopic' in view of its similarities with David Brewster's kaleidoscope, invented in 1816. This ambitious and ground-breaking study not only sheds new light on Hogg's relationship with British Romanticism, but urges a re-thinking of Romanticism itself. It offers original new critical readings of a spectrum of Hogg's key works in a range of genres, demonstrating how his kaleidoscopic literary practice unsettles and reshapes our canonical understanding of the Romantic period and his place in it"--