Haunted Scottish Texts: the Legacy of James Hogg in James Robertson’s Intertextual Novels

This chapter aims to investigate the literary impact that Hogg’s magnus opus The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner had on the contemporary Scottish writer James Robertson, in particular on his two novels The Fanatic (2000) and The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), whose genre hybridity and hermeneutic complexity provide crucial intertextual links with their Romantic predecessor. The essay will start by considering the reasons entitling Robertson’s works to be regarded as examples, like Hogg’s masterpiece, of what critics have defined as Scottish Gothic developing from Ossian, through the Romantic period, up to now. It will then move on to prove not only why and how Robertson’s novels are pervasively haunted by The Justified Sinner – in terms of (meta)textual complexity, narrative multiperspectivism, intermixture of the real and supernatural, and open-endedness – but also why all of them are relevant from a hauntological perspective. Their protagonists are similarly persecuted by ghosts of the past (both Scotland’s national history and their own past experiences), an obsessive spooky presence which renders their identities as fragmented and multilayered as the texts themselves.