The Refraction of Geometry

Abstract

This essay examines the role of geometry in military theory around 1700 and its critical reception in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Juxtaposing literature, maps, and war games, the essay outlines a poetics of war in the eighteenth century and traces the decline of the geometrical order that governs it. A forged continuation of Sterne’s novel written in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars reveals the development of a new poetics and the installment of a military order based on topography and chance.