Wednesday, January 30, 2013

James Hogg


According to the biography on pages 197-8, James Hogg is one of the unfortunate writers whose rise to prominence did not occur until after his death. Even his friends and contemporaries felt his work was substandard. Sir Walter Scott once stated in a letter: "Hogg's Tales are a great failure to be sure. With a very considerable portion of original genius he is sadly deficient not only in correct taste but in common tact" (197).I however found Hogg's works to be just as, if not more so, gripping than the other works we have read this week. Why is it that despite being looked down upon by his contemporaries Hogg has found himself in their company all these years later? My guess is it was not Hogg's work that was found lacking, but rather his background. It was a well known fact that Hogg worked as a shepherd and was illiterate in his early life. His fellow Romantic authors who spoke so boldly about the aristocracy seem to have some of their own preconceptions of class and worthiness.

1 comment:

  1. Many Romantic era writers, artists and painters whose work we value today had only a small following in their own time, and this was often because of their class status. Keats, for example, was lambasted by reviewers for writing poems about classical themes--partly because the poems were unusual and groundbreaking, but also because he was not educated and couldn't read Greek, so the critics disparaged his ability to write about something he had read in translation. This shows the class hierarchies of literature in the early 19th century--and the same applies to art and music. As we'll discuss in a few weeks, Blake was also scoffed at by critics, even though he was recognized as brilliant.

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