Talk:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

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Plot Summary Needs tidying up, tone is far too informal and contains moronic asides.

It is incorrect to state that there are three narrators; there is an editor's prologue, the "confessions" themselves and then an editor's epilogue. Also, it may well be gothic in feeling and in plot, but it was probably too late to be included in the canon of "Gothic novels"; there should be some indication of this.

The spelling in this document is atrocious.

The spelling in this document is atrocious.

204.128.192.3 23:46, 13 December 2006 (UTC) J. Marcus Xavier

[edit] Re:

This is a critique of the book--not information about the book per se. (And it is POV). Must conform to NPOV policy.

I have taken the liberty to edit POVity. Would appreciate feedback on the changes as well.

--JJ

PS Please look and see if you can include the following information in order to expand the article:

"Confessions of a Justified Sinner was probably written and printed during the autumn of 1823 and spring of 1824. Hogg was then living at Altrive in Yarrow, Selkirkshire, a small farm he held on a rent-free life-tenancy, thanks to the kindness of the Duke of Buccleuch.

Hogg's imagination seems to have been caught by the exhumation of a suicide's corpse on a neighbouring farm. He describes this in a letter dated 1 August 1823 and contributed to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for that month under the title of “A Scots Mummy”. With a number of strategic modifications the letter appears within the final section of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in June 1824.

The novel apparently takes the familiar form of a first-person narrative from a manuscript or printed original discovered by an editor and embedded in his own account of its finding and significance. (This convention is parodied by Jane Austen, for example, in the heroine's night-time retrieval of farrier's and laundry bills in Northanger Abbey.) The Editor's narrative, however, does not confine itself to an explanation of the circumstances leading up to the discovery of the manuscript, which, in this case, succeeds rather than precedes the core narrative. The Editor's narrative begins in a pseudo-antiquarian style that on one level gently mocks the opening of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and then quickly turns into a grotesque and exuberant account of a wedding that might have been written by Tobias Smollett (1721-71)."

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