A young Calvinist is assured by a mysterious friend that, as one of the elect, he cannot sin — and the friend has a great many suggestions. Hogg was a self-taught shepherd from Ettrick with almost no schooling; he published this in 1824, it was dismissed for a century, and the twentieth century found in it the sharpest study of religious mania and the double in the language. Fifty plates after Fuseli, Gainsborough and others turn the tale's Calvinist terror into a visual argument, from the weird sisters of Macbeth to owls mobbed by smaller birds.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner : A Scottish Tale of the Elect
Écrit par James Hogg
