Culture and literature: British poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars – Visions of Conflict

In this literary study, Simon Bainbridge highlights the key role that poetry played in the mediation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the British public, and explores the impact that the wars had on poetic practices and theories in the Romantic period. Professor Bainbridge examines the works of authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Smith, Southey, Scott, and Hemans, and locates their work within the huge amount of war poetry published in newspapers and magazines.

Contents:
1 Poetry in 'The Age of War'
2 The poetic imagining of war in the 1790s: Charlotte Smith and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
3 'Was it for this . . . ?': war and poetic identity in Southey and Wordsworth, 1793-1802
4 'Men are we': poetry, war, and gender in Wordsworth's political sonnets, 1802-3
5 Walter Scott's picturesque romance of war, 1805-14
6 'History in the land of romance': poetry and the Peninsular war, 1808-14
7 'Of war and taking towns': Byron's and Heman's post-Waterloo poetry, 1816-25
Epilogue: the 'Sir Walter disease' and the legacy of romantic war
Bibliography
Index

Simon Bainbridge is Professor of English Literature, University of Keele, UK