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John Galt and Circum-Atlantic Memory

The last chapter is devoted to the transatlantic Scottish writer John Galt. An important contributor to Blackwood’s and a key figure in the early settlement of what is now Ontario, Galt’s writing underscores the complex and often conflicted elements of Scottish post-Enlightenment thinking on the relation between the past and present – and the future – in the modern world. On the one hand, much of Galt’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, partakes of an empirically based ‘statistical account’ mode of regional and national enquiry, adopting the assumptions and speculative stance of a Scottish political economy. On the other hand, Annals of the Parish and his Canadian emigrant novels Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet inscribe a complex, and ultimately profoundly unsettling, cultural memory of the circum-Atlantic world. In the ‘annalist’ fiction that recounts the proximate past of the parish of Dalmailing, the ‘theoretical biographies’ of Todd and Corbet, and in other writing, Galt charts the development of a melancholy world-view inspired by a circum-Atlantic memory of constant upheaval and psychic trauma.