ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the early reading habits of James Hogg to highlight the way in which his works absorb structural and stylistic aspects of prior texts, and to establish, more particularly, the source of his metatextual and self-referential narrative style, which places him in the ‘quixotic’ tradition of novelistic discourse. In ‘Robert Wringhim’s Solitude’, Gillian Hughes remarks on Hogg’s tendency to privilege his personal experience rather than his book learning, given his social station and the nature of his public identity as the Ettrick Shepherd. Hogg must have known many of the traditional ballads as part of the oral tradition. When Hogg was in his eighteenth year and serving as a shepherd to Mr Laidlaw, at Willenslee, he made the acquaintance of two other works: Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd and Blind Harry’s poem The Life and Adventures of William Wallace, which he probably read in the paraphrase by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield.
