John Galt

Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society

Regina Hewitt (Ed.)

2012
390 pages
ISBN 9781611484342
Transits

This volume offers a revaluation of the work of Romantic-era Scottish writer John Galt. Galt traveled throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds and founded the Canadian city of Guelph while remaining in touch with local cultures and politics in Scotland and England. He wrote fiction, drama, and biography based on his personal observations of life and in ways that associated him with the "theoretical" or "conjectural" methods of Scottish Enlightenment historiographers. Galt's insights into the societies he inhabited and visited, his perceptions of political extremism and class conflict, his attitudes toward community building and progress, his convictions about determinism and historical revisionism, his strategies for manipulating literary genres and readers' responses, and his ambivalence about the value of literature deserve consideration in light of new thinking in our own fields about what constitutes social knowledge and viable ways to represent it. The essays in this volume examine Galt's work in light of the convergence of literature, history, and social theory in Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic-era culture and in our own interdisciplinary environment. Discussing Galt's work and significance in the many areas, genres, and contexts in which he figures, they broaden the circle of contacts with whom we associate Galt, moving from expected comparisons with contemporaries Walter Scott and James Hogg to unexpected links with such later authors and social thinkers as George Douglas Brown and Harriet Martineau. Moreover, these essays expand the repertoire of works studied, offering the first extended analyses of Eben Erskine, Rothelan, and the Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew along with new readings of Annals of the Parish, Bogle Corbet, and Ringan Gilhaize. Overall, the essays draw out the implications of Galt's practices and relations as a journalist, dramatist, critic, biographer, and novelist, developing grounded conjectures about their significance in Galt's time and our own.

Contributors: Sharon Alker, Alyson Bardsley, Martha Bohrer, Frederick Burwick, Gerard Carruthers, H. B. de Groot, Ian Duncan, Angela Esterhammer, Regina Hewitt, Elizabeth Kraft, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Kenneth McNeil, Robert Morrison, Clare A. Simmons

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Reviews

"This is an important body of work that makes a valuable contribution to critical studies of the long eighteenth century, Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic-era literature. It breathes new life into Galt's work, eliciting a desire to revisit his better known texts, and to seek out those less familiar for a first reading."
--Ainsley McIntosh, University of Aberdeen, Scottish Literary Review 5.2 (2013): 123.

"This collection will bring many back to a Galt they thought they knew,and many to someone who had been on the edge of their vision, and deserves a more central place."--Ian Campbell, Studies in Hogg and his World, 23 (2013): 131-132.

"This is a big collection, one that should go far toward cementing Galt's place in the canons of both Scottish and Romantic-era literature: Hewitt and her contributors have done excellent work here. So too, I want finally to add, has Bucknell University Press."--Evan Gottlieb, 43: 4 (Autumn 2012).

"Galt is elusive in the extreme, but this hypothesis is by far the most convincing description of the enigma so far." --Andrew Monnickendam, Universitat Auto`noma de Barcelona; European Romantic Review 25:4, 496-502 (2014)

About the editor:

Regina Hewitt is Professor of English at the University of South Florida. Her most recent book is The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism (1997). She has also published articles on literature and sociology in journals from both disciplines.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

eBook: 9781611484359