Walter Scott on Monarchy

This book situates Walter Scott's novels on monarchy within both their historical contexts and biopolitical theory, particularly regarding the King's Two Bodies, a notion that, according to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, raises 'the spectre of an absolutism. . .in an abstract physiological fiction.' It attends to Scott's careful calibration of the historical record behind each novel while noting that his reflections on the seismic shifts caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era culminating in The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827) informs his representations of monarchy in the novels. While each novel's consideration of the rights and limitations of royal prerogatives is deeply grounded in its own historical context, Scott's fiction and the Life demonstrate keen awareness of the nineteenth-century shift to what Michel Foucault calls 'governmentality' that is, the sovereign power's project to control and protect subjects, often through surveillance, policing, and the strategic exercise of mercy.

Tara Ghoshal Wallace is Professor Emerita of English at the George Washington University. Her books include Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2010), Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (1995) and she is the editor of Fanny Burney, A Busy Day (1984) and co-editor of Women Critics 1660–1820 (1995).