Walter Scott on Monarchy: Royal Bodies and the Body Politic

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 – culmi...