Conclusion: Expanding the Range of Romanticism

Abstract

This book began by noting that no history of Romanticism has placed Hogg at its core. Standing back and surveying Hogg’s representation today, it becomes clear that recovering the work of a dramatically experimental, non-didactic and ‘marginal’ writer like Hogg has the effect of revealing the way in which canonical accounts of Romanticism have tended to favour writers with more clearly defined and articulated artistic ideas and principles. Other authors may be overlooked for want of a critical treatise or explication of their creative practice, or for their refusal to fit into the tidy generic categories and cultural genealogies that generations of critics have propagated. While readers with an existing interest in Hogg’s work can now explore the full range of his writings in the Stirling/South Carolina edition of his Collected Works, those who are new to literature of the Romantic period might easily miss him altogether since he has been largely edited out of modern anthologies.