Avatars in Edinburgh: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the Second Life of Hogg’s Ettrick Shepherd

In this essay, I deploy the contemporary technical term avatar tointerpret the functions of “the Ettrick Shepherd,” a character associated with James Hoggthat originated in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and appears subsequently inHogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Thenotorious difficulty of Sinner, I argue, is due in part to the movement of theShepherd, as an avatar, from one textual realm to another in a way that reveals the limitsof meaning making in synthetic landscapes. I show how reading the Shepherd as an avatarfurthers our understanding of the novel’s engagement with Blackwood’s, as well asthe experience of readers in Romantic-era Edinburgh, whose literary culture thrived ondynamic representations of and relationships between people in print