This considers the relationship between the elevation of the novel into moral respectability and the turn to anti-heroic discourse. The novels of Daniel Defoe (works influenced by rogue narratives) show little interest in representations of feminine virtue of the kind Richardson foregrounds in his influential Pamela. Where Defoe represents martial violence with relatively few reservations, in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, a concern with feminine virtue is accompanied by anti-heroic discourse which entails critical views of war. As novelists, Fielding and Smollett both represent the malign effects of modern war while, in Amelia, Fielding even represents a form of pacifist feeling. The chapter ends with discussion of the anonymous Ephraim Tristram Bates, in which a potentially excellent soldier is defeated by a corrupt system of military patronage, and of Sternes Tristram Shandy, in which martial virtue has become a matter of moral sentiment, destructive of domestic order.

This chapter surveys the American literary reaction to global warfare in the early twentieth century – primarily World War I – as military events that conditioned, simultaneously, backlashes of political-cultural despair as well as hopes for social regeneration. While it considers well-known classics of the Lost Generation and the malaise shaping its fallout with the mobilization for World War I, it simultaneously problematizes racialized and gendered aspects of those writers’ complaint while examining the war’s differently inflected impact on writing by lesser-known working-class, proto-feminist, and African American novelists. It also considers the advance of modernist interest beyond the Great War into the antifascist struggles of the Popular Front, as well as anticipating the “late” and “post”-modern developments of later war-oriented periods.

This short conclusion pulls together the implications of tracing this cohort’s work and thought, through the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, for our understanding of the social and intellectual processes that accompanied legal-constitutional decolonisation. It focuses on the broader and less state-centric picture that emerges, on the importance of a regional framework to arrive at this ‘distributed’ history, and on the merits of microhistorical methods for revising heroic narratives of both national liberation and global solidarity projects. A new intellectual history of anticolonialism could thus make more room for social histories and collective labour.