A Study Of The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner As A "Romantic"Novel

The Private Memoir and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a novel written by the British writer James Hogg.Hogg as a writer was known for his poetry during the Romantic period and The Memoirs,as one of his few novels,received a cold response from the pubic partly owing to the reputation of the author and partly due to its astonishing content.The novel mainly tells a story about how Robert,a devoted young Calvinist,is induced by a secret and evil man Gil-Martin to commit a series of crimes and is also destroyed by him.Although this work was not popular during Hogg's life time,after the rediscovery of it by the famous French critic Andre Gide in the 1960 s,there are more and more scholars who came to realize the value of the work.However,most of the studies mainly focus on the content of the novel and the relation between the novel and the life experience of the author himself,and pay comparatively less attention to its value as a “Romantic” novel.Here in this thesis,the author holds that the Romantic novel can be used to refer to both the novel written in the Romantic period and a genre,and that The Memoirs is a novel of great value of both two meanings.As a novel written in the Romantic period,it reflects the background of the Romantic period,while as a work of the genre,it is closely related to Romanticism.This thesis mainly consists in five parts.The introduction part gives a brief demonstration of Hogg's life experience and the literature review of the previous studies made of The Memoirs.The central argument,research method,research significance and the research difficulties are also given at the end of the introduction.The first chapter is about the issues on the Romantic novel.Although the situation faced by the scholars on the definition of Romantic is as complex as that of the Romanticism itself,there is a big tendency that when people adopt this term,they refer to at least two meanings: the novel written during the Romantic period and a genre.As the novel of the period,the Romantic novel can reflect the background of the Romantic period.But there are also scholars who insist that not all the novels written in the Romantic period can be called as the Romantic novel.The Romantic novel as a genre must include those novels which have some common features among themselves.The second chapter mainly studies the features of The Memoirs as a novel of the period and its reflection of the background of the time by analyzing the elements of the Gothic novel,the historical novel and the anti-Jacobin novel in it.The third chapter studies the features of The Memoirs as a novel of the genre and its relation to Romanticism by analyzing the theatricality,the depiction of the inner world and the innovation of narrative patterns of it.The conclusion part concludes the features and the value of The Memoirs as a Romantic novel of both meanings.