Overview

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.

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9781399531320

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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. -- Evan Gottlieb, Oregon State University

Author Information

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 Galt’s The Entail for the EUP Galt series.

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