Romanticism and War

This article examines recent Romantic scholarship that has begun to explore the connections between British Romantic period writing and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Countering traditional views that writers were largely unconcerned with the events of these wars, such scholarship has argued that the wars had a significant impact on the writing of the period. Though some critics have viewed the period's writers as unquestioningly reproducing the wars as an exciting spectacle, others have drawn attention to the ways in which the meanings of war were contested through the period. Particularly central to these discussions has been the issue of suffering and the extent to which such suffering was either foregrounded or rhetorically elided from the public's view. The article concludes by looking at some of the most recent trends in this scholarship.