This is one of Hogg's longest and also one of his most original and daring works. Gillian Hughes's uncovering of the original manuscript in the Fales Library of New York University in August 2001 allows the editors to produce here a text that reflects Hogg's original intentions. Alongside the two main plots (the supernatural located at Aikwood Castle and the chivalric located at Roxburgh Castle) a series of embedded narratives provides the reader with, amongst other things, pictures of the traditional and timeless world of rural life in which Hogg had grown up and of early Scottish history. The name Sir Walter Scott (used through most of the manuscript) is restored and passages excised from the manuscript or omitted when the printed edition was prepared are included in the editorial apparatus. In several cases Hogg's more daringly explicit language has been brought back where the printed edition has bowdlerised or subdued the expression. The restoration of the name in particular makes explicit how much this novel represents a challenge to Scott's dominance in the portrayal of chivalry and the Middle Ages in general. Any attempt to assess Hogg as a major novelist, and in particular as a major historical novelist, must consider this edition of The Three Perils of Man.

James Hogg (1770-1835) is increasingly recognised as a major Scottish author and one of the most original figures in European Romanticism. 16 essays written by international experts on Hogg draw on recent breakthroughs in research to illuminate the contexts and debates that helped to shape his writings. The book provides an indispensable guide to Hogg's life and worlds, his publishing history, reception and reputation, his treatments of politics, religion, nationality, social class, sexuality and gender, and the diverse literary forms - ballads, songs, poems, drama, short stories, novels, periodicals - in which he wrote.

Responding to the resurgence of interest in the Scottish working-class writer James Hogg, Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson offer the first edited collection devoted to an examination of the critical implications of his writings and their position in the Edinburgh and London literary marketplaces. Writing during a particularly complex time in Scottish literary history, Hogg, a working shepherd for much of his life, is seen to challenge many of the aesthetic conventions adopted by his contemporaries and to anticipate many of the concerns voiced in discussions of literature in recent years. While the essays privilege Hogg's primary texts and read them closely in their immediate cultural context, the volume's contributors also introduce relevant research on oral culture, nationalism, transnationalism, intertextuality, class, colonialism, empire, psychology, and aesthetics where they serve to illuminate Hogg's literary ingenuity as a working-class writer in Romantic Scotland.