Writing against an enlisted audience: reading war in Sterne, Barbauld, and Hogg

How can a novel or a poem counter a distant war without plainly making the case against belligerence? This project argues for the value of an inventive indirection. Rather than dismissing texts that only tangentially or confusingly represent war as complaisant or innocuous, this project suggests that such texts demonstrate the unexpected insights and generative possibilities that emerge when we move beyond didacticism. The three experimental works of literature at the center of this study—Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—emerged during the development of modern war during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. What they demonstrate is the worth of pairing a critique of war with a consideration of what we are about when we take in the mediated presence of a distant war—whether that presence is felt in the inconsistent influx of news from abroad, in the predictions of an upcoming military campaign, or in the graverobbing of a shared cultural past for the sake of a contemporary belligerence. Ultimately, these texts expand our understanding of resistance literature, challenging us to reconsider the possibilities and limitations of opposition, of reading, and of representing the public spectacle of modern war.