Gothic Hogg

James Hogg’s Gothic emerged from the vernacular storytelling tradition of Lowland Scotland, a form that was acknowledged as modern and which nonetheless recalled a primitive past. The reanimation of folk culture challenged the discourse of improvement and cultural Anglicization, counterposing the post-enlightenment, secular rationalism of Edinburgh with the popular folk culture of the Borders. This disjunction between enlightenment and superstition was a founding dynamic of early Gothic, and in his uncertain relation to Edinburgh literary culture, and Blackwood’s in particular, Hogg’s Gothic inhabits both imaginative spaces. By the 1820s, the Gothic may have been viewed by many as an outmoded form, yet Hogg’s work ‘modernizes’, gives renewed life to, a relic from an earlier age. This chapter will examine a range of Hogg's fiction to show how these narratives reject Walter Scott’s historical fiction, and its taming of uncanny, pre-modern elements that Hogg unleashes so effectively.