Writing against an enlisted audience

Europe’s Romantic era witnessed the arrival of total war in the form of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Under the expansive principles of total war, the Romantic public, scripted by the state’s address, played a novel role in a military campaign’s distant theatre. This dissertation demonstrates not only how extensively the dynamics of reading, attention, and spectatorship are entangled in modern warfare, but how such a thorny entanglement is concurrent with experiments in literary form. In 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, I read a series of experiments intent on making visible the modern, wartime phenomenon of the enlisted audience. Each text follows a distinct approach in its inventive representation of the enlisted audience, but all stage its behavior such that their readers can register the mechanisms of mediation and recognize the ideological pretenses inherent in the state’s address—be it manifest in the sentiment of an occasional poem, in the calculus of a Fast Day sermon, or in the wartime marshalling of Romantic tradition. By concentrating on these three reflexive experiments, I argue that we can deepen our historical study of mass mediated war and discover new insights into how certain texts, aware of their own status as wartime media, responded to the aesthetic practices that operated on behalf of total war during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.