Professor Douglas Gifford, Emeritus Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, explores James Hogg's most famous work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This shocking tale of a minister's son who believes himself chosen by God to punish those he sees as evil-doers, and who has a mysterious guide in all his atrocities, has been labelled a Gothic story - yet it has more in common with traditional Scottish folk-tales, but with the alternative possibility of an astonishingly modern reading, in which there are no devils and no wonders, only the delusions of a diseased mind. Professor Gifford guides the listener through the turns and twists of the novel, accompanied by atmospheric readings of selections from the text by John Shedden. Both psychological and supernatural elements are explored, along with the background to Hogg and his works. This double-disk audio CD makes an excellent tool for classroom use or for home study.

With a strong, vibrant use of Scots, McLellan intermingles comedy with serious moral and political content. McLellan's collected works brings together previously unpublished plays like Jeddart Justice with acknowledged classics such as Jamie the Saxt and a selection of his prize-winning poems. Also included are a Foreword by playwright and poet Donald Campbell and an Epilogue by drama producer Alastair Cording.

This substantial new volume is a stimulating yet in-depth introduction to Scottish literature in English and Scots. From medieval to modern, the entire range of literature is introduced, examined and explored. Aimed primarily at those with an interest in Scottish literature, this guide also responds to the need for students and teachers to have detailed discussions of individual authors and texts. The volume looks at Scottish literature in six period sections: Early Scottish Literature, Eighteenth-Century, The Age of Scott, Victorian and Edwardian, The Twentieth-Century Scottish Literary Renaissance, and Scottish Literature since 1945. Each section begins with an overview of the period, followed by several chapters examining exemplary authors and texts. Each section finishes with an extensive discussion including suggestions as to how to further explore the rich and often neglected hinterlands of Scottish writing. Extensive reading lists identify primary texts of the period as well as details of a wide range of additional authors. Opening up neglected areas of study as well as responding to the burgeoning interest in novelists, modern poets and dramatists, this book serves as an invaluable guide to Scottish Literature.

In his own lifetime and for nearly a hundred years James Hogg was was seen as the natural, if lesser, inheritor of the mantle of Robert Burns. Hogg was "the Ettrick Shepherd," self-taught, author of the long poem 'The Queen's Wake' and numerous poems and songs of Border life and love, befriended by Walter Scott and presented in the pages of Blackwood's Magazine as a colourful, boastful, deep-drinking rustic. But with the American publication in 1824 of 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' the picture began to change. This study, first published in 1976, is the first to attempt to trace the real relationship between Hogg and his Edinburgh contemporaries, and to show how Hogg developed from poetry to fiction and his major novels. The book is both an assessment of Hogg as a major novelist and a study of the social and literary snobbery which was beginning to dominate Edinburgh in the age of Walter Scott.

n the fast disappearing slums of the Claggans district of a big Scottish city, only a few tenements still stand. In this strange half-world a small group of men and women live out one hot summer week of their lives. Experience is heightened by the presence of a maniac among them-a man whom some of them at least must know, a sex killer who already has his eye on his next victim and is planning to strike again. But this is in no way a whodunit. It is a warm and human story of the loves, fears and hopes of simple people: of Mrs Sheehan, feeling lost and useless with her family grown up and gone; of old Pat Brady and his sons in the neglected, womanless apartment opposite, tossed in cross-currents of pity, love and hate; of Eugene Carty, tied to a tyrannical invalid mother, whose problems have an unexpected end; of young Bernadette Sheehan, whose return home after eighteen months working in London, dramatically changes the course of several lives. Moira Burgess has drawn on her own experience while working as a librarian in Glasgow to create the lives and background of her characters, and her natural powers as a storyteller to weave these into a convincing whole. Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian, born in Campbeltown, Argyll, and now living in Glasgow. Writing has been the most important part of her life since childhood and she has published two novels, The Day Before Tomorrow (first published in 1971) and Speak, Adam published as A Rumour of Strangers in 1987 and reprinted in 2009. For some years she worked mainly on non-fiction, publishing The Glasgow Novel: a bibliography (3rd edition 1999) and a book on the same topic, Imagine a City (1998). Author of Mitchison's Ghosts, a study of the supernatural and mythical elements in the work of Naomi Mitchison, she is now working on an edition of Mitchison's collected prose. Douglas Gifford is Professor Emeritus of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.

This collection of Scottish short stories has been chosen to give as wide as possible a picture of Scottish fiction of the nineteenth century. Authors such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, John Galt, Margaret Oliphant, and Robert Louis Stevenson are widely known as major figures outside Scotland, and this collection - which also includes stories from lesser-known authors such as W.E. Aytoun, James Grant, George McDonald, William Black, and William Alexander - places them within the context and tradition of Scottish literature. The volume has been compiled and annotated by Douglas Gifford (former senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Strathclyde) for use in schools and universities as well as for general reading.