War

Chapter 4 investigates how the War of the Spanish Succession was reconfigured as a War of the British Succession. During the early modern period, warfare provided a stimulus to imaginative writing. At the start of the eighteenth century, Britain’s new status as a military superpower profoundly affected literary culture. By examining a range of official, popular, and diplomatic responses of military victories, including poems by Joseph Addison, Nahum Tate, and Daniel Defoe, this chapter illuminates local partisan meanings in texts reacting to the war and succession crisis. Moving through popular news, court propaganda, panegyrics, and satires, it establishes how the war became a lens through which to view dynastic crisis.