Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690-1820

Inbunden, Engelska, 2023

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Ranging over political, moral, religious, artistic and literary developments in eighteenth-century Britain, Andrew Lincoln explains in a clear and engaging style how the 'civilizing process' and the rise of humanitarianism, far from inhibiting war, helped to make it acceptable to a modern commercial society. In a close examination of a wide variety of illuminating examples, he shows how criticism of the terrible effects of war could be used to promote the nation's war-making. His study explores how ideas and methods were developed to provide the British public with moral insulation from the overseas violence they read about, and from the dire effects of war they encountered at home. It shows, too, how the first campaigning peace society, while promoting pacificism, drew inspiration from the prospects opened by imperial conquest. This volume is an important and timely call to rethink how we understand the cultural and moral foundations of imperial Britain.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-11-23
Mått155 x 235 x 20 mm
Vikt640 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor314
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781009366540

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Andrew Lincoln is Emeritus Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London. He has previously published on William Blake, including a 1992 edition of Songs of Innocence and Experience and the monograph Spiritual History (1996), and on Walter Scott, with his monograph Walter Scott and Modernity (2007). His current research focuses on eighteenth-century responses to war and ideas about how to achieve peace.

I. Developing Ideals: 1. The Culture of War and Civil Society, from William III to George I; 2. War and the Culture of Politeness: The Case of The Tatler and the Spectator; 3. Sacrifice: Heroism and Mourning; 4. Sacrifice: Christian Heroes; II. Developing Questions: 5. War and the 'Elevation' of the Novel; 6. War and the 'Science of Man'; III. War and Peace in an Age of Revolutions: 7. Complicities in the Novel; 8. Saving Individual Virtue; 9. Saving Communal Virtue; 10. The ideal of Non-resistance; IV. The Landscape of Conquest: 11. A Case Study: Gibraltar.

'Lincoln's book has at its heart a fascinating question: how do eighteenth-century Britons manage at the same time to see themselves as increasingly civilized and as almost perpetually committed to war? In clear, strong prose, Lincoln moves across the long eighteenth century, tackling both a wide range of literary texts and other cultural works including philosophy and journalism and treating both hypercanonical authors (such as Austen) and texts clearly deserving more attention (Richard Glover's Leonidas). Avoiding a reductive binary between war and civilization, he provides a panoramic view of how Britons thought about war and dreamed of peace.' Jeffrey Cox, Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities, University of Colorado, Boulder