This is to announce a new essay, focusing on The Reign of George VI, a XVIII-century speculative fiction.
This research aims at fostering a better understanding of how future wars were imagined in European literature, against the backdrop, on the one hand, of the cultural history of time and, on the other, within the context of the crisis of the European temporal mind during the eighteenth century.[1] It does this by analysing a fascinating early futuristic fiction, The Reign of George VI. 1900–1925: A Forecast Written in the Year 1763, which displayed a very specific interest in (future) military history and polemological strategy. [2]The Reign of George VI is here interpreted within a long history of imagined warfare and placed within a cultural context shaped by eighteenth-century European armed conflicts. Published anonymously in London in 1763 (or possibly at the beginning of 1764), this proto-novel offers a fascinating spatio-temporal representation of a future war at the crossroads of British national and imperial construction, European tensions, and power relations increasingly global in their scope.[3] These elements make it a significant chapter in the development of a secularised futuristic imagination, and an eloquent testament to the Seven Years War as a catalyst of cultural change.
