Emma Tennant Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Karl Miller

Critical Essay by Karl Miller

In Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister, gentlefolk are distressed when one of their number is put to death by his illegitimate daughter. Dependence on the fiction of the first Romantic period is in this case deliberate, explicit, and surprising. So far from shy is Emma Tennant that she has used as a model James Hogg's celebrated novel of 1824, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg describes the or-deal of a fanatic, who, duped by antinomian Calvinism, by the teaching that those to whom God's grace has been given can do no wrong, anxiously aspires to a sense of infallibility, and falls into the "deep gulfs" reserved, in the poet Cowper's words, for God's castaway…. Emma Tennant writes about a modern fanaticism, a new infallibility. So far as execution or "finish" is concerned, objections can be pressed to what she does, but the strategy she has hit on for emulating...
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