Find the best price forThe History of Matthew Wald

Isabelle Bour

Paperback, Published in Apr 2001 by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

ISBN10: 3631366671 | ISBN13: 9783631366677

Page count: 182

Between 1821 and 1824 John Gibson Lockhart published four novels: only Adam Blair has been regularly reprinted. The History of Matthew Wald (1824), his other Scottish novel, is a gripping Gothic tale which can be compared with William Godwin s or Charles Brockden Brown s fiction. Walter Scott, Lockhart s father-in-law, praised the -power- of this novel. Though there is some social comedy a la Galt in Matthew Wald, Lockhart is more concerned with Scotland as a spiritual and psychological environment than with social detail. He focuses on the hero s mental torment, summing up the plot dynamics by saying, in a review article of his own novel, that -everything is decidedly and entirely subordinate to the minute and anxious, although easy and unaffected, anatomy of one man s mind-. Matthew s plight can be seen as an emblem of Scotland s unstable cultural identity in the Romantic period.
Together with an introduction this edition provides explanatory notes, a bibliography, a chronology of J.G. Lockhart, a note on the text and a glossary of Scots words."