Midsummer Night Dreams and Related Poems (Innbundet (stive permer))

The late Jill Rubenstein was Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, and the editor of James Hogg's Anecdotes of Scott among other scholarly works relating to Scott, Hogg, and their contemporaries. Gillian Hughes is the author of the biography James Hogg: A Life (EUP, 2007) and is editor of the journal Studies in Hogg and his World. She has edited or co-edited seven volumes in the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg series. Meiko O'Halloran is a Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University. She contributed an essay to the Stirling/South Carolina Edition volume of The Queen's Wake, and is currently preparing a monograph called Hogg's Kaleidoscopic Art.

This collection is comprised of ten of Hogg's poems which, in very different ways, explore the visionary and supernatural, and the writer's portrayal of them - echoing the subject and title of Shakespeare's famous play. Included among the poems are: 'The Pilgrims of the Sun', which seeks to demonstrate Hogg's command not only of his native Scottish tradition of poetry but also of the English tradition of Milton and Pope; the weirdly brilliant 'Connel of Dee'; 'The Gyre Caryl' in which Hogg recounts the birth of Heavenly Grace and the departure of the fairies from Scotland; and 'Verses Addressed to the Right Honourable Lady Anne Scott of Buccleuch'. Taken together the ten poems of Midsummer Night Dreams and Related Poems substantiate Hogg's vaunted claim to be 'King o' the mountain and fairy school' of poetry.

Essay on the Genesis of the Texts; Introduction; 'Circling the pales of Heaven' - Hogg and Otherworld Journeys from Dante to Byron; Midsummer Night Dreams and Related Poems; Hogg's Notes; Appendix 1 - MS Fragment of 'The Field of Waterloo. A Poem'; Appendix 2 - Hogg's MS Notes to The Pilgrims of the Sun'; Note on the Texts; Editorial Notes; Glossary.