Imagining Military Conflict during the Seven Years’ War

Two features, avoidance and imaginative contradiction, characterize the martial literature of the Seven Years’ War. Many contemporary texts avoid confronting the success, territorial expansion, and killing of the war by re-imagining it in terms of defense, and many contain mixed, even contradictory, attitudes. Though enthusiastic about British military glory, they are reluctant to show killing or conquest, and are often drawn toward contemplation of the death of heroes. The contradiction betrays doubt, usually unacknowledged, about both war and the possibility of representing it. That doubt occurs in its most radical and comically self-conscious form in Tristram Shandy.