Performing authenticity: James Hogg and the portable short story

Abstract

James Hogg (1770-1835), the labouring-class writer from Selkirkshire in Scotland, was the subject of the marginalising forces of class prejudice and economic inequality during his lifetime. In the 184 years since his death, Hogg’s place in literary histories of the Scottish – and British – Romantic-era has been characterised as peripheral and dissident. This thesis readdresses Hogg’s relationship to marginality by arguing that he had agency in the construction of his identity as an outsider. It foregrounds the formal characteristics of the short story, historicised within specific contexts of publication, in shaping Hogg’s performance of authenticity in relation to class, place, and language. In doing so, the thesis argues that authenticity is a performative function of text and form, rather than a natural essence of authorship and authorial biography. The performance of authenticity functions within and through the Hoggian short story’s characteristic portability. I argue that portability incorporates two dialogically related elements: materiality and narrative aesthetics. Firstly, portability is defined in its literal sense of material transference. Hogg’s short stories moved between contexts and media of publication, from one periodical to another, from periodical to book, and from one geographic location to another. The thesis also argues that portability is constructed within short stories, providing a unifying framework for Hogg’s interrogative narrative praxis, identified elsewhere in Hogg studies as a cross-generic aesthetic of his fiction and poetry. Those narrative aesthetics are grounded in the formal characteristics and historical contexts specific to the short story form and its mutable contexts of publication.