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The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt

RothelanA Romance of the English Histories

Edited by Adam Kozaczka and Clare A. Simmons

Format

£19.99

About this book

History mingles with romance in John Galt’s only novel set in the English Middle Ages

  • The first annotated edition of John Galt’s Rothelan
  • Includes an extensive introduction, glossary, and appendices provide context for the novel’s conception and historical framework
  • Explores a neglected example of Romantic-era medievalism

Set in England, Scotland and France during the fourteenth century, John Galt’s Rothelan (1824) engages with major historical contexts including the Black Plague pandemic, Anglo-Scottish warfare and the Hundred Years’ War. Remarkable in its time for its representation of an alternative Jewish history showing sympathy for Jewish communities and for taking women’s agency seriously, the novel tells a story of usurped inheritance while narrating major historical events from the reign of King Edward III. Present-day students of literature may appreciate the novel’s metafictional play, including a found text device and a chapter that jokingly mocks a Walter Scott novel. Presented for the first time in a modern, annotated edition, this authoritative text features an introduction and appendices with background information pertaining to the novel’s content and relevant contexts.

Reviews

This fine edition proves Galt was not only a wryly observant chronicler of quotidian Scottish life but also a first-rate historical novelist. Rothelan richly earns the comparisons it encourages to Scott’s Ivanhoe, and Galt’s multi-faceted portrayal of Adonijah deserves at least as much scholarly attention as Scott’s Isaac and Rebecca. With their confident presentation of this engrossing novel of plots and counterplots in fourteenth-century England, Kozaczka and Simmons have opened another vista for lovers of Scottish literature in general and admirers of Galt in particular.
Table of contents

Preface to The Works of John Galt
Acknowledgements
Chronology of John Galt
Introduction
Origins of the Story
Reception and the Historical Form
Characterization
Metafiction
Editions, Translations, and Textual Matters
Rothelan; a Romance of the English Histories
Emendations
End-of-line Hyphens
Appendices
1: Timeline of Historical and Fictional Events
2: Plays about Edward III
3: The Controversy about the Music
4: Gabriel de Glowr
Explanatory Notes
Glossary

About the contributors

Adam Kozaczka

Adam Kozaczka is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M International University. He has published numerous articles in the law and literature subfield and especially on Walter Scott, in ELH, Studies in Romanticism, the European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Law & Literature among other venues. He is especially interested in character studies both in literature and in legal history.

Clare A. Simmons

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.

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