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Books Like Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Best books to read after Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
Readers disturbed and fascinated by Hogg's theological horror and narrative ambiguity will find companion works in the literature of the psychological double, the Gothic tradition of diabolism, and the Scottish literary heritage.
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Victorian novella most directly in Hogg's lineage — the double/alter-ego structure, the respectable man destroyed by his hidden nature, and the Scottish Calvinist context (Stevenson was deeply aware of the theology of election) make Jekyll and Hyde the most obvious literary descendant of the Justified Sinner.
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Melmoth the Wanderer
by Charles Maturin
The contemporary Gothic novel that works in the same territory as the Justified Sinner — Melmoth, who has sold his soul to the Devil for extra years of life, wanders through centuries trying to find someone to take his bargain; the theological horror and supernatural tempter-figure make it the natural companion to Hogg's novel.
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The novel that most fully develops the religious and psychological obsessions of the Justified Sinner — Ivan Karamazov's rebellion against God and the famous chapter of the Devil appearing to Ivan as a shabby gentleman explore the same questions about election, theodicy, and the criminal mind that Hogg dramatizes through Wringhim and Gil-Martin.
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The Monk
by Matthew Lewis
The Gothic novel that most directly parallels the Justified Sinner's theological transgression — Ambrosio, the monk destroyed by his own theological pride and demonic tempter, is the closest English analogue to Wringhim and Gil-Martin; both novels show religious certainty as the most dangerous form of pride.
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Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
The Gothic novel written five years before the Justified Sinner that explores the same questions about creation, responsibility, and the consequences of transgressive overreach — Victor Frankenstein and Robert Wringhim both overreach in ways that destroy them; reading both shows the range of early nineteenth-century Gothic exploration of selfhood and conscience.
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William Wilson
by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe's short story about a man haunted by his moral double — written in 1839, directly after the period of the Justified Sinner's composition; Poe's William Wilson is the most immediate American development of the double-figure that Hogg invented in Gil-Martin, and the compressed story is a perfect companion to Hogg's sprawling novel.
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The Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
The novella that develops Hogg's concern with the self's capacity for evil into a colonial context — Kurtz, like Wringhim, has a theology of his own superiority that enables his atrocities; reading both shows how the Justified Sinner's exploration of self-justifying evil anticipates one of the central concerns of modern literature.
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The Heart of Midlothian
by Walter Scott
The Scottish novel that most fully contextualizes the Calvinist culture Hogg is satirizing — Scott's novel about Jeanie Deans and the Porteous Mob is set in the same Edinburgh Calvinist world that produced Robert Wringhim's theology; reading both gives the widest picture of Scottish religious culture in the early nineteenth century.
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