Gillian Russell

Introduction: Tracing War in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture

The study of Romantic literature and culture, long concerned with the response to the French Revolution, has more recently begun to appreciate the significance of war. Drawing on this research and featuring many who have contributed to this field, the essays in this volume engage the pervasive effects of war in Enlightenment and Romantic-period culture. The period covered, from approximately 1750 to 1850, has been traditionally regarded by military historians as a relatively self-contained era in the evolution of warfare and its battlefield technologies. An era before wars began to be fully transformed by industrialisation, it represented the culmination of an early modern military revolution that saw a transformation in European war-making with the spread of firearms, artillery, fortifications and new forms of military drill.1 While in certain respects our period could be viewed as the last, distinctive phase in this revolution, it is also clear that new military techniques emerged that both enabled and demanded the kinds of massification of war that had transformative effects on society as a whole, leading to modern forms of total war. Political, economic and military historians now recognise the conflicts of the long eighteenth century as being of fundamental importance to the development of the British nation-state, creating the ‘ fiscal-military’ state linking taxation, the credit economy and state authority, and shaping national and imperial identity in terms of an antagonistic Gallic or colonised ‘other’.2

Romantic Militarisation: Sociability, Theatricality and Military Science in the Woolwich Rotunda, 1814–2013

In a critique of the current state of scholarship on war across a range of disciplines, sociologists Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton identify ‘war’s recalcitrance as an object of knowledge’ which, they claim, has led to a lack of ‘shared ontological problematics’ that might ground the study of war.1 War’s epistemological slipperiness accounts for the fact that it eludes disciplinary or interdisciplinary definition to the extent that it resists disciplinisation (p. 142). Barkawi and Brighton propose approaching the ontological complexity of war in terms of what they label ‘War/Truth’, a ‘complex of relations between war, knowledge, and power’ that ‘enables the tracing of the intimacy between the battlefield and the wider social, political, and cultural field war helps constitute’ (p. 127). They argue that the key features of an ontology of war are firstly, war’s historicity, its ‘universal and historically contingent character’ (p. 134), and secondly, fighting, including that practiced on the battlefield by combatants and also fighting’s capacity to unmake and remake knowledge as a form of ‘general subjective violence … a violence to meaning’ (p. 137). Barkawi and Brighton quote from Emmanuel Levinas to the effect that war makes people ‘“play roles in which they no longer recognise themselves”’ in ‘“an order from which no one can keep his distance”’ (p. 136), a comment which highlights another dimension of the ontology of war — though Barkawi and Brighton do not address this — that is, war as a form of theatre.

“A HINT OF IT, WITH INITIALS”: ADULTERY, TEXTUALITY AND PUBLICITY IN JANE AUSTEN'S LADY SUSAN

In spite of Jane Austens professed “eye” for an adulteress, comparatively little attention has been paid to adultery and divorce as themes and contexts of her fiction. Her unpublished epistolary novel Lady Susan has a distinctive status in Austens oeuvre, recognized as being exemplary of her “style” and yet atypical of her later achievement. A neglected context for the novel is the extensive reporting of adultery trials in contemporary print culture and the moral panic concerning adultery in the 1780s and 1790s, focusing initially on the adulteress as the brazen woman of fashion and later as a figure of sentimentalized abjection. A particularly notorious case, that involving Lady Henrietta Grosvenor and George IIIs brother, the Duke of Cumberland, is directly alluded to in Lady Susan. The textual strategies of adultery trial literature, particularly its emphasis on indirection through the use of detail or “hint”, had a long-term influence on the development of Austens fiction and her positioning of herself as a professional writer after the 1790s.