John Galt

Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society

Regina Hewitt

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781611484359
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Observations and Conjectures on John Galt’s Place in Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic-era Studies
• Section I: Progress, Memory, and Communities
• Chapter 2: Remembering John Galt
• Chapter 3: Altered States: Galt, Serial Fiction, and the Romantic Miscellany
• Chapter 4: The Sense of No Ending: John Galt and the Travels of Commoners and Kings in “The Steam-Boat” and “The Gathering of the West”
• Section II: Conflict and Consensus
• Chapter 5: John Galt’s Annals of the Parish and the Narrative Strategies of Tales of Locale
• Chapter 6: The Corrective Detective: Genre and Masculinity in Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk
• Chapter 7: Trauma and Witness in Ringan Gilhaize
• Section III: Justice and Tolerance
• Chapter 8: “Feudal Days”: John Galt’s Ambivalent Medievalism
• Chapter 9: John Galt’s Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew: History and Identity; Narrative and Nation
• Chapter 10: Galt and the Theater
• Chapter 11: John Galt’s Angular Magazinity
• Section IV: Identities and Ethics
• Chapter 12: Public Benefits and Private Gains: The Provost and The Member
• Chapter 13: Time, Emigration, and the Circum-Atlantic World: John Galt’s Bogle Corbet
• Chapter 14: Agency, Destiny, and National Character: John Galt and Europe
• Chapter 15: John Galt, Harriet Martineau, and the Role of the Social Theorist
• Contributors