Jeffrey N. Cox,Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years.

Abstract

AS Jeffrey Cox reminds us in his introduction to this wonderful new addition to the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series, recent work by Bainbridge, Bennett, Favret, Shaw, and others, has shown that ‘war is never far from the central works of the Romantic imagination’ (1). Romanticism in the Shadow of War reflects further on the impact of war on the cultural history of the Romantic period, although not in the way that a reader might at first expect from a book with this title. Cox’s subject is not the responses of individual Romantic-period writers to the key events and players of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Rather he is concerned with how the dynamics of hope and disappointment which marked the interlude between the Peace of Amiens and the Hundred Days gave rise to new genres and new modes of cultural productivity in English Romanticism, primarily though not exclusively amongst Radical writers. The history of war during the Romantic period, Cox argues here, is best understood less as a series of high-profile engagements than as a continuous process of ‘small feints, limited campaigns, border raids’ (4). And this idea of ‘border raids as cultural practice’ (1) in Radical writing provides Romanticism in the Shadow of War with its leitmotif: writers ‘working below social barriers and beyond national boundaries’ to create ‘key modes of modern literature, raiding their own and other cultures to create new sociolects, new ways of speaking about themselves and their worlds’ (4).