Set in England, Scotland and France during the fourteenth century, John Galts 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 womens 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 novels 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 novels content and relevant contexts.
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
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 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 Galts The Entail for the EUP Galt series.
