Our next lunchtime work-in-progress seminar takes place on Wednesday 9 March. Our two project managers will each give a short talk:<\/p>\n
Helen Stark<\/a> (QMUL)\u00a0A \u201cCharnel-Vault\u201d: Corpses in Walter Scott\u2019s <\/em>Paul\u2019s Letters to His Kinsfolk<\/strong><\/p>\n Describing the ploughing of the battle field at Waterloo, the titular protagonist of Walter Scott\u2019s part-fictionalised travelogue Paul\u2019s Letters to His Kinsfolk<\/em> (1816) comments that \u2018I should have been better pleased, if, [\u2026] the field where, in imagination, the ploughshare was coming in frequent contact with the corpses of the gallant dead, had been suffered to remain fallow.\u2019 Dead bodies are invoked again in Paul\u2019s description of the Museum de Monumens Fran\u00e7ais in Paris as a \u2018charnel-vault\u2019 where each pillaged painting \u2018has its own separate history of murder, rapine, and sacrilege\u2019.\u00a0Despite this suggestive engagement with Waterloo, Paul\u2019s Letters <\/em>has been the subject of little sustained critical analysis. This paper will argue that Scott\u2019s travelogue articulates Europe-wide anxieties about how to memorialise Waterloo and the role of the dead in that memorialisation. In doing so, I draw on Philip Shaw\u2019s argument that the \u2018problem with peace\u2019 is \u2018its tendency to undermine stable concepts of identity\u2019 (Shaw, 2002). In tracing the displacements, misreadings and rereadings of the dead structuring competing narratives of Waterloo, Scott exposes the fractures and tensions in European identities revealed, rather than resolved, by this battle.<\/p>\n