Winter Evening Tales

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. Ian Duncan studied at King's College, Cambridge, and Yale University; he is Florence Green Boxby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (1992), Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), and editions of works by Walter Scott and James Hogg. He is a General Editor of the Collected Works of James Hogg.

Hogg must be the most unavailable of the major Scottish writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. The new edition, therefore, performs a crucial function. Moreover Winter Evening Tales is going to be one of the most desirable volumes, on grounds of sheer readability and aesthetic merit. For students of Hogg, of Scottish literature, of romanticism, and of the tale collection as a form, it counts as “essential reading”.