Entail
Regular price
€112.99
Memorable for characters eccentric yet socially and economically representative, and for scenes alternately comic and tragic, John Galt’s 1823 novel The Entail is a compelling story of greed, anxiety, and tradition against a background of social upheaval. In addition to making this remarkable novel available in a scholarly edition with annotations suitable both for the general reader and for research, the editors provide an introduction that makes its complex legal issues—of property, marriage law, trial procedures—accessible in the context of Scottish Romanticism and modernisation. Situating Galt’s aesthetic choices in dialogue with the Romantic-era Scottish novel the volume discusses the text, Galt’s letters, early periodical reviews, and recent scholarship. Through annotations that clarify Scots language and dialect as well as legal parlance, the editors highlight the novel’s comic collisions of language and personalities, and the attention to social transformation that Galt painstakingly, although sometimes obliquely, details.
John Galt was a Scottish novelist, entrepreneur, and political and social commentator. Mark Schoenfield is a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where he specialises in law and literature and periodical culture. The author of The Professional Wordsworth (Georgia, 1996) and British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The “Literary Lower Empire” (Palgrave, 2009), a co-winner of the Colby Prize, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for research toward his current project on the Culture of Litigation, 1770-1835. Clare A. Simmons is Professor of English at The Ohio State University, USA. She is the author of multiple works on nineteenth-century English and Scottish literature and on medievalism, most recently Medievalist Traditions in 19th-Century British Culture (2021). With Mark Schoenfield, she co-edited John Galt’s The Entail for the EUP Galt series.