John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society ed. by Regina Hewitt (review)

Abstract

Unlike his literary contemporaries Walter Scott and James Hogg, who have enjoyed a substantial critical recovery in the late twentieth and early twenty¢rst centuries, John Galt has continued to su¡er from relative obscurity. This volume, containing ¢fteen wide-ranging essays by leading critics of Scottish Romantic literature, represents a landmark move towards redressing this critical imbalance by uncovering Galt’s unique and wide-ranging contribution to the literary terrain of his time and asserting his position as a writer of particular signi¢cance for ours. The collection’s subtitle is charged simultaneously with meaning in Scottish Enlightenment historiographical terms, and with interpretative signi¢cance for contemporary social theory, relative in both contexts to how social knowledge is constructed. It indicates that aspect of Galt’s ¢ctional achievement, ‘his ability to represent people acting in society’ (" ), of greatest signi¢cance here, and the network of contingencies through which the volume’s contributors engage with his writing. The volume is organised into four topical thematic sections: ‘progress, memory, and communities’; ‘con£ict and consensus’; ‘justice and tolerance’; ‘identities and ethics’. These broad classi¢cations allow the scope of its discussion to move beyond the parameters of conventional literary criticism, so that Alyson Bardsley reads Ringan Gilhaize; or, The Covenanters within the context of trauma studies and Regina Hewitt draws upon social theory in her comparative analysis of Eben Erskine; or, The Traveller and selected works of Harriet Martineau. This arrangement facilitates both fresh readings of Galt’s most frequently discussed works, and the ¢rst sustained critiques of lesserstudied texts, including Rothelan, and the Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew. This interdisciplinary approach to Galt be¢ts so multifaceted a writer; and these essays celebrate the incredible diversity of Galt’s oeuvre, which includes experimental forays into the writing of novels, poetry, drama, short stories, sketches, tales, travelogues, biography, autobiography, dramatic criticism, children’s literature and political journalism. An awareness of how Galt exploits the potentialities of generic properties and narrative strategies to form conjectures about the dynamics of community-formation at the