Spy

James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. He is best known for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Gillian Hughes, Independent Scholar, has been a General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, and is currently an advisory editor for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry and for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. She has published critical editions of works by each of these writers, and also a biography of James Hogg.

When complete, Mack's edition will contain more volumes than the Waverley Novels. Hogg, so vitally displaced, yet so easily able to articulate his native terrain, is finding his true home at last ! In her shrewd and elegant introduction to the Spy, Gillian Hughes points out that by 1809 Hogg [ ! ] urgently needed money, work, company. He had to reinvent himself. The Spy was his solution ! Reprinting the periodical in full, Gillian Hughes lets us see all the more clearly the milieu in which Hogg's deep and tricksy gift acquired its protean flexibility. Here, cannily, he learned the taste of the market, but he did not simply follow fashion. Experimenting with points of view, tuning and retuning his voices, he became the author who would write some of the strangest fiction of his age, and whose sense of generic mobility would take him from being an exponent of the ballad and essay to a pioneer of the short-story form. The Spy documents his self-education as a writer. Through it he made himself, for good and bad, a Romantic icon. -- Robert Crawford The text of a literary magazine published by Hogg in 1810-11 containing fascinating insights not only into the poet but also the Edinburgh of his day. Again, superbly annotated, very handsomely produced, the publication of this shows real confidence in Scottish writers and their universal appeal ! This is a bold, masterly stroke in Scottish publishing. A volume as handsome as its predecessors in the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition. We can indeed delight on proving Hogg wrong in his prediction that The Spy would never be printed. When complete, Mack's edition will contain more volumes than the Waverley Novels. Hogg, so vitally displaced, yet so easily able to articulate his native terrain, is finding his true home at last ! In her shrewd and elegant introduction to the Spy, Gillian Hughes points out that by 1809 Hogg [ ! ] urgently needed money, work, company. He had to reinvent himself. The Spy was his solution ! Reprinting the periodical in full, Gillian Hughes lets us see all the more clearly the milieu in which Hogg's deep and tricksy gift acquired its protean flexibility. Here, cannily, he learned the taste of the market, but he did not simply follow fashion. Experimenting with points of view, tuning and retuning his voices, he became the author who would write some of the strangest fiction of his age, and whose sense of generic mobility would take him from being an exponent of the ballad and essay to a pioneer of the short-story form. The Spy documents his self-education as a writer. Through it he made himself, for good and bad, a Romantic icon. The text of a literary magazine published by Hogg in 1810-11 containing fascinating insights not only into the poet but also the Edinburgh of his day. Again, superbly annotated, very handsomely produced, the publication of this shows real confidence in Scottish writers and their universal appeal ! This is a bold, masterly stroke in Scottish publishing. A volume as handsome as its predecessors in the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition. We can indeed delight on proving Hogg wrong in his prediction that The Spy would never be printed.