Citation:
Date Published:
8 January 2022Abstract:
Set in the 1790s, at the height of fears of French invasion, Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary aims to keep at bay the violence that threatens Scotland. Yet despite the novel’s efforts to resolve potential violence via the discursive, liberal institutions of the law and polite conversation, conflict and military power are never far from the surface. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of security, this article argues that the novel does not eliminate conflict but reimagines it as a version of militarized governmentality. The novel might excise war, in other words, but only in so far as the military is rendered into a force that transcends national conflict through its status as both protector and interpreter of the nation. Scott’s novel rewrites a history of war not only around a narrative of liberal progress but equally around a narrative of social administration and security.
October 2021: Dr Neil Ramsey is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and convenor of the Conflict and Society Research Group at UNSW Canberra. He works on the literary and culture responses to warfare during the eighteenth century and Romantic eras, focusing on the representations of personal experience and the development of a modern culture of war. His first book,The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835, was published by Ashgate in 2011. His most recent, a collection co-edited with Gillian Russell, Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, was published by Palgrave in 2015. His second book, Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing is under contract with Cambridge University Press and due for publication in 2022.