Abstract

"Parting Shots" views eighteenth-century literature from across the body-strewn battlefields of the English Civil Wars, and analyzes the transformation of shattered men into cultural embodiments of meaning. The essay analyzes the processes of indirection and displacement through which texts, over several generations, negotiate conflicts and problems too difficult to be confronted whole and entire. In order to develop an argument about lingering anxiety over civil conflict, the essay draws on Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier and Robinson Crusoe, soldier's manuals and examples from works by Swift, Manley, Sterne, Pope, and Smollett.

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