THE DEVIL I AM SURE

Three Short Stories by James Hogg

Introduction by David Robb

By: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2017
Published in: PDF, ePUB and mobipocket 

Click here to watch David Robb’s talk on three short stories of James Hogg, plus other videos from the 2017 ASLS Schools Conference.

James Hogg, “The Ettrick Shepherd” (1770–1835), is remembered today as the author of that strange and unsettling novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. To his contemporaries, though, he was probably better known for his poems and for his stories – especially his supernatural tales, which often drew upon the folk-beliefs of the Scottish countryside.

The three stories in this volume – “Mary Burnet”, “The Brownie of the Black Haggs”, and “Strange Letter of a Lunatic” – fall into this category. In each, Hogg demonstrates his mastery of the craft of storytelling, and his understanding of the quirks, possibilities, and dark undercurrents of human psychology.

CONTENTS
Introduction
Mary Burnet
The Brownie of the Black Haggs
Strange Letter of a Lunatic
Notes

Cover image: “The Brownie of Blednoch”, by Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864–1933)