The Rhetoric of National Humiliation: Patrick Brontë’s “Winter-night Meditations” and the Peninsular War

Abstract

ABSTRACT Patrick Brontë’s Winter-evening Thoughts (1810) is thought to have been published in response to a national day of fasting and humiliation held on 28 February 1810. The rhetoric of national humiliation which Brontë employs can also be detected in fast-day sermons and war poetry published during the Peninsular War (1808–1814). This essay argues that the annual, systematic practice of national fast days throughout the Napoleonic Wars encouraged schematic modes of imagining and representing war. Literary traces of this ideological framework of nationalism are evident in the use of particular rhetorical devices which connect individual and nation, and language that is often biblical or eschatological. By highlighting these devices in a period that was thoroughly immersed in the ideology and practice of national humiliation, this essay expands on existing scholarship of national humiliation and Romantic literature with the aim of facilitating textual analysis in other periods in which national humiliation has been practiced.