CULTURAL WORK OF EMPIRE: THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR AND THE IMAGINING OF THE SHANDEAN STATE

the long version

"This book argues that the Seven Years' War (1756-63) produced both an intense historical consciousness within British cultural life regarding the boundaries of belonging to community, family and nation, and a radical re-imagining of the state and the subjectivities of those who inhabit it." "The book concentrates on the period from the mid 1750s to the 1770s. Laurence Sterne's work is explored alongside that of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, Voltaire, Sarah Scott, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Tobias Smollett, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Collier, Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. It incorporates debates among moral philosophers and philanthropists, examines political tracts and grammar exercises, and paintings by Kauffman, Hayman and Wright of Derby, tracking the investments in, and resistances to, the cultural work of empire."--BOOK JACKET.