(Download) "Supernatural Modernity in Walter Scott's Redgauntlet and James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Critical Essay)" by Extrapolation # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Supernatural Modernity in Walter Scott's Redgauntlet and James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Critical Essay)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 212 KB
Description
Writing in the early nineteenth century, Scottish writers Walter Scott and his sometime protege James Hogg employ the fantastic to reveal the relationship of the supernatural past to modern identity and nationality. Scott and Hogg chart very different courses, however, between skeptical modernity and the supposed supernatural past. Indeed, they appear to inhabit two seemingly separate literary worlds: contemporary and metropolitan Edinburgh after the Scottish Enlightenment (Scott) and the rural border regions steeped in a vanishing culture of folklore and fairy tales (Hogg). Initially, the fantastic, the literature of the unreal or of the supernatural as exploded belief, appears to be more important to Hogg's work than to Scott's. However, despite differences, the fantastic is not less important for Scott than for Hogg, only deployed differently, indicating a more moderate politics and poetics of the supernatural. Ultimately, these writers represent together two sides of an argument about the purpose of the fantastic in the emerging Romantic novel as it responds to the dislocations of early nineteenth-century cultural transformations. Scott's apparent rejection of the fantastic instead conserves its affect in order to negatively define rational modernity; Hogg turns Scott's argument around by asserting what might be called a supernatural modernity, the radical embracing of the literary supernatural as a haunting, as a discredited past that will nevertheless not stay buried but rises up to make unignorable claims on the present and to reveal the necessary self-deceptions that underwrite the possibility of modern subjectivity at all. Scott's Waverley novels, such as Redgauntlet (1824), ground his fiction in a history that embraces Scotland's profitable nineteenth-century present of commerce and empire while sadly but plainly rejecting its separate heroic and supernatural past. His characters find themselves drawn nostalgically to the superstitious Highlands and the Romantic dream of an independent Scotland, but ultimately learn to value the practical rewards of the then-recent Union with the British. Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (also, uncannily, 1824) presents a more prominent and disturbing fantastic, one that confounds the seemingly separate worlds of past and present Scotland. While the devilish Gil-Martin, for example, can be identified with exploded supernatural belief as the embodiment of the devil of folklore tradition, his presence cannot be finally dismissed as superstitious delusion either by the work's modern and enlightened narrator or the puzzled reader. The fabulous past in Hogg's work continues to haunt and disrupt the present, questioning the integrity of modern subjectivity and reality as built on a skeptical rejection of the supernatural.