Bogle Corbet: or The Emigrants

by John Galt, Katie Trumpener (Editor)

Overview

Through the life-story of its eloquent but depressive narrator, Bogle Corbet links the industrial revolution in Scotland to the French Revolution, Jamaica’s plantation economy to the settlement of English Canada. A pioneering industrial novel, colonial novel, and world systems novel, Bogle Corbet also offers an early psychological portrait of emigrant experience. Galt’s vivid vignettes show Britain and key British colonies at moments of political unrest and transition, and explore the ambivalences of a world newly governed by industrialism, capitalism, globalisation, and mass displacement. Galt’s novel thus remains a work for our own times, even as it offers important transcontinental insights into a key historical juncture. It has inspired eloquent champions (both nineteenth- and twentieth-century) and continues to spark critical debate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474449465
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	09/20/2023
Series:	The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Galt was a Scottish novelist, entrepreneur, and political and social commentator.

Katie Trumpener is Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University. Her publication Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton UP, 1997) won the MLA First Book Prize and the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She has co-edited On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama Between Canvas and Screen (with Tim Barringer, Yale UP, 2020), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (with Richard Maxwell, 2008), and the journal Modern Philology (1998–2003).

Table of Contents

Preface to The Works of John Galt

Acknowledgements

Chronology of John Galt

Introduction

Origins

Historical Contexts

Literary Contexts

Reception

Bogle Corbet; or, The Emigrants

Emendations

End-of-line Hyphens

Appendices

1: Excerpts from Reviews and Reception

2: Maps of Significant Locations

Explanatory Notes

Glossary

Editorial Reviews

In Bogle Corbet, Galt brought his pioneering brand of social fiction to a broader canvas, encompassing a transatlantic world unsettled by colonialism, revolution, slavery and industrialization. The first unabridged reissue of the novel since 1831, this edition includes a superb introduction and supplemental material that provide multiple points of context, illuminating Galt’s engrossing portrait of the British Atlantic.

Kenneth McNeil