Habeas Corpus: British Imaginations of Power in Walter Scott's "Old Mortality"

This essay addresses Walter Scott’s The Tale of Old Mortality alongside Giorgio Agamben’s study of the history of Western sovereignty to argue that even as Agamben’s work helps us to clarify the political implications of Scott’s novels, these novels reveal alternatives to modern subjectivity through an older, law-based conception of land. Thus, Scott’s fictional landscapes demand a reading that is far more geographically literal than the use of land as a symbol for nation, that resists the illusions of certainty encouraged by text, and that envisions jurisdictional power as a counterpoint to the emergence of modern political subjectivity.