ABSTRACT
Walter Scott and his sometime protege James Hogg both employ the fantastic to reveal the relationship of the supernatural past to modern Scottish identity and nationality. Scott and Hogg chart very different courses between skeptical modernity and the supposed supernatural past. Scott's apparent rejection of the fantastic instead conserves its affect in order to negatively define rational modernity; Hogg turns Scott's argument around by asserting what might be called a supernatural modernity. David Daiches writes: 'Red gauntlet is the story of two worlds: the world of Alan Fairford and his father, which is the realistic, unromantic, modern world; and the world into which Darsie stumbles, romantic anachronism'. Scott's Red gauntlet and Hogg's Justified Sinner, both published in 1824; deploy the fantastic in relation to opposed views of modernity. Hubert Tessandier briefly explains the complicated relation of Scott's fiction to his politics in the Handbook to English Romanticism: Scott's political stance in relation to Scottish and British politics contained built-in contradictions.
