This book argues that the Seven Years' War (1756--63) produced an intense historical consciousness within British cultural life regarding the boundaries of belonging to community, family and nation. Global warfare prompts a radical re-imagining of the state and the subjectivities of those who inhabit it. Laurence Sterne's distinctive writing provides a remarkable route through the transformations of mid-eighteenth-century British culture. The risks of war generate unexpected freedoms and crises in the making of domestic imperial subjects, which will continue to reverberate in anti-slavery struggles and colonial conflict from America to India. The book concentrates on the period from the 1750s to the 1770s. It explores the work of Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Burke, Scott, Wheatley, Sancho, Smollett, Rousseau, Collier, Smith and Wollstonecraft alongside Sterne's narratives. It incorporates debates among moral philosophers and philanthropists, examines political tracts, poetry and grammar exercises, and paintings by Kauffman, Hayman, and Wright of Derby, tracking the investments in, and resistances to, the cultural work of empire. Key Features * Topical in its focus on the making of 'modern' subjectivity during the first 'global war' * Path-breaking in advancing our understanding of the cultural history of eighteenth-century Britain * Timely in its combination of new historical research with a critical engagement with debates in postcolonial and subaltern studies * Original in its account of the literature of the Seven Years' War and its outstanding analysis of the writing of Laurence Sterne

Considerations of writing about war, in war, because of war, and against war, in a wide range of texts from the middle ages onwards. War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has been its only subject. In this volume, the contributors reflect on the uneasy yet symbiotic relations of war and writing, from medieval to modern literature. War writing emerges in multiple forms, celebratory and critical, awed and disgusted; the rhetoric of inexpressibility fights its own battle with the urgent necessity of representation, record and recognition. This is shown to be true even to the present day: whether mimetic or metaphorical, literature that concerns itself overtly or covertly with the real pressures of war continues to speak to issues of pressing significance, and to provide some clues to the intricateentwinement of war with contemporary life. Particular topics addressed include writings of and about the Crusades and battles during the Hundred Years War; Shakespeare's "Casus Belly"; Auden's "Journal of an Airman"; and War and Peace. Ian Patterson is a poet, critic and translator. He teaches English at Queens' College, Cambridge. Laura Ashe is Associate Professor of English and a Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Contributors: Joanna Bellis, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Mary A. Favret, Rachel Galvin, James Purdon, Mark Rawlinson, Susanna A. Throop, Katie L. Walter, Carol Watts, Tom F. Wright, Andrew Zurcher.

Essays on the links between film and fiction, and their mutual influence. Fiction and film interrelate closely to each other, and the specially commissioned essays in this volume all consider different aspects of this relationship. Beginning with discussions of Dickens and Victorian literature, the contributors, all leading scholars in this field, demonstrate how visual devices like the magic lantern caught the interest of writers and affected their choice of subject and method. The impact of the cinema on the British modernistsis then discussed, and the remaining essays provide detailed case studies on such subjects as Hemingway, Updike, and the depiction of women in contemporary fiction and film.

"This is poetry at the edge of the land, but also at the edge of our horizon. Kelptown is Kemptown, so we are on the south coast of England. But this is not a poetry in which borders are fixed. What we are given instead is a language of continuities, lines of contact and connection that conventional place-making keeps from view. We are standing at the shore, knowing that the waters are rising, but knowing also that our only hope is to situate ourselves in a radically different way. Carol Watts gives us a poetry which lives, and shows us how we can learn to live, alongside fellow species, which allows us to register again what we walk among. It is a poetry of loss and of an intense politics of loss: we are given 'DeExtinction Poems' and 'Notes on a Burning World'. But is also a poetry that knows it must 'make a home/ on friable shores, built from inundate truths'. These beautiful lines are from the book's title sequence, where Watts raises the Thoreau-like question: 'How do I live, tenant among your long fronds'. More than ever we need our poets to help shape our answers to such questions. And Carol Watts' imaginary is a most crucial response. Written across the past decade, through what can seem like the end times, these are poems that open us to new relations with the world." -David Herd

"As `blue comes on' in these elegies, a unique genre emerges, a lyrical epic that speculates on a world imagined through the physics of blue light, `cyanometrics', the blue waves of the spectrum, shorter and faster moving when split from the norm of white light. In this new, formative referential world of blue, perception changes. As Carol Watts thinks blue, and makes strange cognitive experience, the long-held European myth of the power of vision as a knowledge-making faculty dissolves, along with the confident centrality of the perceiving subject. There is no `I' in this work, the first person is eliminated. In this new space/time of her enigmatic lyrics a spare, cryptic language evolves. Just as blue comes to us through the earth's atmosphere, scattered by molecules, the words on the page are like particles, suspended by a minimal syntax. So we discover new relations. With its charge of blue, the four parts of the poem move from speculation to threnody and even to prophecy as the earth's atmosphere that hosts light gradually takes on ecological terror. This terror penetrates to inner and to civic lives, to networks of finance and to myths of gender. This is a major philosophical poem of our generation." - Isobel Armstrong

Written over 12 months, from 23 September 2006 to 14 September 2007, Carol Watts' sequence of poems explores the freight of a year with an ear to its future. Fragments and "cuts" of time and memory, light, sound, weather, the voices of children. John Clare wandering among rinds of a shoe-making village and city parakeets. Small series, detonating. The working through of an occasional tense, its cost, its serious music, its gift. This is Carol Watts' second poetry collection for Reality Street, the first having been "Wrack" (2007).