My second book, Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790-1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money, appeared in Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures with Edinburgh University Press in 2010. This project analyzes ways in which writers in Britain and the United States explored new possibilities of professional authorship by portraying mercenary writers, fighters, and lovers. Writers of central interest include Charles Brockden Brown, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and James Fenimore Cooper.
A version of this book’s chapter about Walter Scott’s mercenaries, especially in Quentin Durward, was published in Studies in Romanticism.
Materials related to the book have also formed the core of these conference papers:
- “Women Write of Mercenaries: Soldiering and Authorship in the Romantic-Era Women’s Novel,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Supernumerary Conference, Bologna, March 2008
- “Ormond’s Fighters: Authorship, Soldiering and the Transantlantic Charles Brockden Brown,” Symbiosis Biennial Conference, Thessaloniki, July 2005
- “Good Though Rather for the Foreign Market: Mercenary Writing and Fighting in Scott’s Quentin Durward,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Annual Conference, Boulder (CO), September 2004
- “Mercenaries and the Enlightenment: Fighting and Writing from Adam Smith to James Hogg,” Union and Cultural Identities in Eighteenth Century Scotland, University of Edinburgh, July 2002
