The essays in this volume revalue the work of the Romantic-era Scottish writer John Galt, connecting his methods and goals with Scottish Enlightenment "conjectural" historiography and with later social theorizing. Emphasizing the construction, representation and use of social knowledge, the essays find new meaning in Galt's perceptions of the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds in which he traveled, his attitudes toward community building and progress, and his innovations in fiction, drama, journalism and biography.

Table of Contents
Illustrations  
Chapter 1: Introduction: Observations and Conjectures on John Galt's Place in Scottish
Enlightenment and Romantic-era Studies  by Regina Hewitt
Section I.  Progress, Memory, and Communities
Chapter 2: Remembering John Galt by Gerard Carruthers
Chapter 3: Altered States: Galt, Serial Fiction, and the Romantic Miscellany by Ian Duncan
Chapter 4: The Sense of No Ending: John Galt and the Travels of Commoners and Kings in "The
Steam-Boat" and "The Gathering of the West" by Caroline McCracken-Flesher
Section
II. Conflict and Consensus
Chapter 5: John Galt's Annals of the Parish and the Strategies of Tales of Locale by Martha Bohrer
Chapter 6: The Corrective Detective: Genre and Masculinity in Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk by Sharon Alker
Chapter 7: Trauma and Witness in Ringan Gilhaize by Alyson Bardsley
Section III. Justice and Tolerance
Chapter 8:  Feudal Days: John Galt's Ambivalent Medievalism by Clare A. Simmons
Chapter 9: John Galt's Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew:
History and Identity; Narrative and Nation by Elizabeth Kraft
Chapter 10:  Galt and the Theater by Frederick Burwick
Chapter 11: John Galt's Angular Magazinity by Robert Morrison
Section IV. Identities and Ethics
Chapter 12: Public Benefits and Private Gains: The Provost and The Member by H. B. de Groot
Chapter 13: Time, Emigration, and the Circum-Atlantic World: John Galt's Bogle Corbet by Kenneth McNeil
Chapter 14: Agency, Destiny, and National Character: John Galt and Europe by Angela Esterhammer
Chapter 15: John Galt, Harriet Martineau, and the Role of the Social Theorist by Regina Hewitt
Contributors
Index

Regina Hewitt is professor of English at University of South Florida.