The Entail

or The Lairds of Grippy

Edited by Mark Schoenfield, Clare A. Simmons
Original Author John Galt

Hardback

$130.00

Ebook (app) i

$24.95

Ebook (PDF) i

$24.95

Galt’s tragi-comic novel of conflicted desires presented in historical, legal, and local contexts

The first scholarly edition to focus on the complex legal nuances that pervade the novel, including Scottish entails, court procedure, and the figure of the lawyer
An introduction that explores—and notes offering easy access to—the growing research on John Galt, his narrative techniques, and cultural interventions of one of the first generational novels to sweep over 100 years of social change
A critical apparatus glossing the Scottish dialect, language, and customs, the historical references (with an emphasis on their economic implications), and the legal terrain that was an urgent concern of the novel’s original readers

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.

Contents

Preface to The Works of John GaltAcknowledgementsChronology of John Galt

IntroductionOrigins of the StoryHistorical BackgroundLanguageNamesComedy and TragedyEntails: Law and LiteratureReceptionA Real-Life Entail Story

The EntailEmendationsEnd-of-line Hyphens

Appendices1: Family Trees2: Maps of Significant Locations3: Timeline of Historical and Fictional EventsExplanatory NotesGlossary

Reviews

Galt’s most ambitious foray into novelistic fiction gains new vitality in this definitive edition. Opening up The Entail for current readers, the editors provide a lucid introduction that brings into focus Galt’s mobilisation of an intergenerational family saga to track the pressures of modernisation in eighteenth-century Scotland. A judiciously chosen apparatus supplements the text to locate and clarify its innovative force.
– Ina Ferris, University of Ottawa

About the Author

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.