It is a commonplace in the study of nationalism that the construction of national identity inevitably relies on the creation and use of narratives—part history, part myth—that imbue nations and nationalist projects with coherence and purpose. This article seeks to render this idea more complex and analytically useful by asking how such narrative discourses become connected to personal identities. Why and how do people invest themselves in nations and nationalisms? An important part of the answer lies in the ways that constructions of narrative and agency at the collective level articulate with experiences of narrative and agency at a personal level. It is our constant existential concern with power that binds together collectivities and individuals, national narratives, and life histories. We must attend to this connection in order to better understand the powerful resonances nationalist discourses often have.

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Narrative, Agency, and Mood: On the Social Construction of National History in Scotland

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts, and Other Evidence, by the Editor was published anonymously in London in . Figure  reproduces the frontispiece and title page of the book. The frontispiece is a facsimile extract from a manuscript journal, corresponding to page  of the printed text, which turns out to be the penultimate entry in the ‘‘Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner.’’ In the book’s concluding section, the anonymous editor gives an account of the discovery of the manuscript. He reprints an ‘‘extract from an authentic letter, published in Blackwood’s Magazine for August, ,’’ describing the exhumation of the corpse of an eighteenthcentury suicide at a remote location in the Scottish Borders. The letter is signed ‘‘ ’’: a figure well known to contemporary readers as ‘‘the Ettrick Shepherd,’’ the author of traditional Scottish ballads, lyrics, and tales and, over the past few years, some more contentious forays into the metropolitan genres of novel and metrical romance. Hogg’s letter can indeed be found printed, under the title ‘‘A Scots Mummy,’’

Authenticity Effects: The Work of Fiction in Romantic Scotland

“It has been asked, ‘Have we no materials for romance in England? Must we look to Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this kind?’ And we answer – ‘Yes!’ Every foot of soil...

Pastoral against Pastoral Modernity: Voices of Shepherds and Sheep in James Hogg's Scotland

In Liaozhai zhiyi, a collection of almost five hundred tales by Pu Songling (1640 - 1715), young scholars fall in love with beautiful fox spirits or meet ghosts in abandoned temples; corpses walk and men change into birds; hideous apparitions invade the home, bodies become unfamiliar, children are born to women long dead, and things are rarely what they first seem. Throughout the collection, the monstrous intrudes on the ordered spaces of the human world, bringing disorder but also the fulfilment of desire.

The collection was written by a man who was trapped in the 'examination hell' of the Chinese civil service system, and in the years since his death has brought him the success he never achieved in his professional life, being read, critiqued, loved, and adapted by successive generations, until the work itself has become as monstrous as a hybrid as some of the creatures within its pages.

The Liaozhai tales which have received the most critical and popular attention are the tales of enchantment and romance between human men and ghosts or fox spirits. Yet this focus on only certain types of tale has meant that the collection, which is made up of patchwork of different traditions and influences, is rarely considered as a whole.

This thesis attempts to redress the balance by arguing that the collection is a monstrous hybrid, made out of fragments of folklore, myth, previous stories and pure invention, using different literary traditions and created by the assumed persona of an author -the Historian of the Strange -who is himself as hybrid as some of the creatures in his tales. Because of this textual hybridity, combined with the myriad anomalous figures within its pages, the thesis takes the representation of monstrosity as central to the collection, using Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's 'Monster Culture' as a starting point. His influential work, first published in 1996, argues that the monster is a 'cultural body', containing the fears, anxieties and desires of the culture in which it is born.

I hope that the thematic focus on the monster will allow the collection to be approached as an entity, considering the different types of tale, and the different figures within them, and how they work together or against each other. I argue that the examination of the monster as a 'cultural body' will add to the understanding of Liaozhai within the context of early Qing society and culture, in the way it can be seen as paradoxically both subverting and supporting social norms.

Monsters and monstrosity in Liaozhai zhiyi

Doppelganger narratives of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries relate in different and sometimes incompatible ways to their Romantic precursors. They often parody these precursor narratives, criticize their popular interpretations, or tinker with their conventions. Some of them follow the Romantic tradition in highlighting the harsh rivalry between "original" and double and its catastrophic results, whereas in others the double acts as a catalyst for self-reflection and self-transformation. Doppelganger narratives of the last decades tend to focus on the intersection of the psychological with the scientific or the aesthetic domains, while the significance of the supernatural principle is reduced, eliminated, or replaced by implausible coincidences and analogical relations typical of (post)modern fiction. In order to demonstrate these ideas, the article begins with an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816) and continues with an exploration of five types of later Doppelganger narratives.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/partial_answers/v011/11.2.marcus.pdf

Recycling of Doubles in Narrative Fiction of the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

Robert Colwan, a clergyman's son, is so confident of his salvation as one of the Lord's elect that he comes to look on himself as a man apart, unhindered by considerations of mere earthly law. Through Robert's own unforgettable account, we follow the strange and sinful life into which he is led by a devilish doppelganger - a life that will finally lead him to murder. Steeped in the folkloric superstitions and theological traditions of eighteenth-century Scotland, this macabre and haunting novel is a devastating portrayal of the stages by which the human spirit can descend into darkness.

James Hogg

Papers

Xi. the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner