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Warfare and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Or, Why Eighteenth-Century Fiction Failed to Produce a War and PeaceMaximillian E. Novak The topic of this essay has a short history.' As a member of a panel at a conference of the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1990, 1 had given a paper treating some of Defoe's attitudes towards warfare. During the question period, Paul Alkon asked the question, "Why didn't the eighteenth century produce a War and Peace!" Like everyone else, I attempted some kind of a response, but neither mine nor those of my fellow panelists seemed halfway satisfactory. If the question meant "Why did the eighteenth century not produce something equivalent to Tolstoy in England?" it was a non-starter. Why did the nineteenth or twentieth century not manage it either? But aside from any British novelist's inability to achieve Tolstoy's panoramic sweep, 1 A version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the Johnson Society of the Middle-West on 27 April 1991. I benefited greatly from the animated discussion that followed and incorporated a number of suggestions into the body of the paper and into the notes. I must confess mat I became interested in the depiction of warfare and the hero in eighteenthcentury fiction because it had rather suddenly become a subject mat was not topical—a subject that might be treated with a certain distance and without too grave a fear of trivializing into literary criticism what we know to be a matter of suffering and death. The sudden outbreak of the Persian Gulf War, after I had completed most of my writing, showed me die folly of dunking that Üüs was the proper time to gain some distance from my subject, but it was also an occasion for reading the debates on stragegy and for observing the almost instant manufacture of heroes so necessary for endeavours of this kind. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 3, April 1992 186 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION broad human sympathies, and intellectual depth, there was still a question that might be answered: Why did eighteenth-century British fiction not produce an entirely successful novel which addressed, in serious terms, the important issues aroused by war—its sufferings and violence—in contrast to a vision of ordinary life with its sufferings and joys? This was clearly the thrust of Paul Alkon's question—a question that should be answerable through an analysis of the development of fictions involving war as well as through an analysis of attitudes towards the military hero. This paper is one attempt at such an answer. Perhaps the problem of War and Peace in eighteenth-century British fictions might be less complicated if we focused on Sir Walter Scott's Waverley rather than on Tolstoy's masterpiece. As everyone knows, Scott's novel is set in the eighteenth century at the time of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. His vision of British history, as it developed through the series of novels treating England and Scotland between the rebellion of the Covenantors in 1679 (Old Mortality) and the uniting of the British people against France and Napoleon at the end of the century (The Antiquary ), was recognizable as a version of eighteenth-century philosophical history.2 Although various Scottish philosophers refined this vision during the century, it was not very different from that which may be read out of the development of Robinson Crusoe's island. A people strive to unite, but differences are too great to overcome, and something equivalent to civil war erupts. Some accommodation is reached, but real unity is only achieved by threats of invasion from some outside, alien forces, be they cannibals or Frenchmen, a distinction which many in Britain would not have found significant. It is essentially a progressive view of history with clearly demarcated stages of development. Edward Waverley is an English officer but, through a combination of love and the machinations of the Jacobites that succeed in having him branded a traitor, he ends up fighting with the rebels. He is eventually disillusioned by the horrors of 2 The fullest development ofmis kind ofhistory may be found in...

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