Entail

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.

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.

• Preface to The Works of John GaltAcknowledgementsChronology of John GaltIntroductionOrigins of the StoryHistorical BackgroundLanguageNamesComedy and TragedyEntails: Law and LiteratureReceptionA Real-Life Entail StoryThe EntailEmendationsEnd-of-line HyphensAppendices1: Family Trees2: Maps of Significant Locations3: Timeline of Historical and Fictional EventsExplanatory NotesGlossary