Introduction

I write the introduction to this issue with great sadness, as my composition signals that its true author, John Richardson, is no longer here to write it himself. At the same time, I am heartened and touched that the authors featured here, as well as the editors of Eighteenth-Century Life, have come together to release this special issue in tribute to John and to his life of exemplary scholarship.

The essays in this volume were originally delivered as part of a workshop—"Literature and War"—that John hosted at the National University of Singapore in April 2018. Later in his career, John had gravitated toward this topic, and specifically toward depictions of suffering as they emerged across eighteenth-century poetry. Initially, this turn seemed to me strange and incongruous; John was kind, fatherly, and full of sardonic wit—why this attraction to conflict, violence, and anguish? And isn't war an awfully curmudgeonly topic? I soon came to understand, of course, the embarrassing unfamiliarity that engendered this response. As the essays in this issue demonstrate, new theories about war and its representation, whether biopolitical, affective, or linguistic, are redefining how we understand and experience the violent conflict that has proven, however depressingly, one of the most enduring facets of human existence. I also realized that John, of all people, would want to analyze the dynamic of discord and how it arises; how suffering can be articulated and understood; and how war has its own poetics that demand our careful attention: gentle souls are often attuned to such topics because they know the stakes of interpretation are tremendously high.

As John himself emphasized, the long-held assumption that war is not a major feature of eighteenth-century literary production is simply not true.¹ While there is no major work that offers a sustained account of the experience of war—no War and Peace, as Max Novak famously argued nearly thirty years ago—we find authors across the century grappling with the reality of war and its lasting effects.² It was, after all, an era of almost incessant war, from the English Civil Wars through the revolutionary and Napoleonic battles at the turn of the nineteenth century.³ The Age of Reason is also the Age of War—an age, then, far beyond the scope of reason. Indeed, the century looks different when viewed through the lens of war, as recent scholarship in both the eighteenth century and Romantic periods has illustrated.⁴ This scholarship has picked up dramatically over the past twenty years, as we see in the pioneering work of Mary Favret, Gillian Russell, Simon Bainbridge, Philip Shaw, Suvir Kaul, Jeffrey N. Cox, Sharon Alker, M. John Cardwell, Carol Watts, and Neil Ramsey, to name only a few.⁵ As all of these scholars demonstrate in varied ways, apprehending war—its true costs, its violence and suffering, its role in national and colonial enterprises—demands the work of imagination. Specifically, an ongoing concern in recent scholarship, and in many of the essays featured here, is how imaginative and aesthetic frameworks allow individuals to sound the depths of experiences that resist direct expression. If pain and suffering often elude language, as Elaine Scarry has elegantly argued, the realm of imagination opens an alternative means of articulation.⁶

While Scarry and others like Jonathan Lamb have shown us "the failure of language adequately to express what happened or what it is like to experience an incomprehensible event," or, in other words, the "embarrassment of language in the face of an immeasurable phenomenon" like "pestilence, war, starvation, and death," the vast majority of eighteenth-century individuals did not experience war directly.⁷ Instead, as Favret has established, war was mediated via "institutions and verbal conventions that filtered and altered its content"; ultimately, such mediations created an "aphasia about war" that not only protected contemporary readers, but also, as she suggests, stymied criticism up until the present day.⁸ Favret expands these concepts in War at a Distance (2010), which elaborates on the dynamic of distance and shows how war permeated home in fundamental yet often imperceptible ways: "The literature of...