Throughout his career, self-taught Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835) violated literary proprieties which discouraged the frank treatment of prostitution, infanticide, and the violence of war. Contemporary reviewers received Hogg’s bluntness rather fiercely because, in so doing, he questioned the ideologies of chastity, marriage and military masculinities that informed emerging discourses of the British Empire. This book reveals the strategic use that Hogg made of the marriage plot to challenge the civilising ideal of the motherly heroine as well as martial and sentimental masculinities which supported the discourse of a strong but tamed national vigour, thereby highlighting Hogg’s critical use of gender stereotypes in relation to norms of class and ethnicity when deconstructing this plot convention.