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

Unlike his literary contemporaries Walter Scott and James Hogg, who have enjoyed a substantial critical recovery in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, John Galt has continued to suffer from relative obscurity. This volume, containing fifteen 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 significance for ours.

The collection's subtitle is charged simultaneously with meaning in Scottish Enlightenment historiographical terms, and with interpretative significance for contemporary social theory, relative in both contexts to how social knowledge is constructed. It indicates that aspect of Galt's fictional achievement, 'his ability to represent people acting in society' (17), of greatest significance 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'; 'conflict and consensus'; 'justice and tolerance'; 'identities and ethics'. These broad classifications 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 first sustained critiques of lesser-studied texts, including Rothelan, and the Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew.

This interdisciplinary approach to Galt befits 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 local, national and international level informs the critical focus of all the essays within this collection.

As Gerard Carruthers highlights, Galt articulates the complexities of the human condition in ways more frequently associated with modernist literature. Observing continuities between Galt's Annals of the Parish and George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901) and with Muriel Spark, Carruthers reads Galt's 'deep skepticism towards storytelling' as the impulse that drives him to 'incorporate within his fictional mode an ironically disruptive fabric' (43). Similarly, Ian Duncan remarks upon the significance of incompletion and fragmentation in Galt's serialised contributions to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, positing this strategy as an attempt to 'replicate a distinctively modern mode of temporal experience' while simultaneously supplying 'its antidote, in the effect of stasis that follows a withdrawal from linear, plot-bound narrative time' (62).

Focusing again upon Galt's disruptive narrative strategies, Caroline McCracken-Flesher presents the multiplicity of narrative viewpoints and voices in Galt's sketches, 'The Steam-Boat' and 'The Gathering of the West', as a legitimate challenge to the overarching grand narratives of 'kings and crowns' (73). Community is constructed and reconstructed through acts of communication that resist such 'unitary tales' (74). Pointing to the sketches' lack of closure, or non-ending, McCracken-Flesher observes that we 'know how these tales might end, but not how they must' (79), thereby suggesting an inverted process of conjectural historiography.

In her critique of Ringan Gilhaize, Alyson Bardsley joins these critics in pointing to Galt's denial of 'the closure plot affords' (142), and the limitations of 'witness' implied in this text. Again, Frederick Burwick's essay, 'Galt and the Theater', foregrounds the privileging of character and dialogue over plot that was a feature of Galt's practice as playwright and dramatic critic (231). Sharon Alker treats the eponymous working-class protagonist of Sir Andrew Wylie...