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British Romanticism and Peace brings perspectives from the field of Peace Studies to bear on the writing of the Romantic period. It explores how writers such William Wordsworth and Jane Austen wrote work that inspires others to imagine the possibility of peace and to resist discourses of military propaganda.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Helen Maria Williams and the 1783 Peace of Paris
- 3: Wordsworth, 1802
- 4: William Cobbett and the Possibility of Peace
- 5: Austen, Keats, and the jus post bellum
- 6: Afterword
About the author
John Bugg is Professor of English at Fordham University in New York City. He is the author of Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2013), and editor of The Joseph Johnson Letterbook (Oxford University Press, 2016) and the Oxford World's Classics edition of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (2020). His essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, ELH, TLS, Studies in Romanticism, and several other journals.
Summary
This is the first book to bring perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of Peace Studies to bear on the writing of the Romantic period. Particularly significant is that field's attention not only to the work of anti-war protest, but more purposefully to considerations of how peace can actively be fostered, established, and sustained. Bravely resisting discourses of military propaganda, writers such as Amelia Opie, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, William Cobbett, John Keats, and Jane Austen embarked on the challenging and urgent rhetorical work of imagining--and inspiring others to imagine--the possibility of peace. The writers formulate a peace imaginary in various registers. Sometimes this means identifying and eschewing traditional militaristic tropes in order to craft alternative images for a patriotism compatible with peace. Other times it means turning away from xenophobic discourse to write about relations with other nations in terms other than those of conflict. If historically informed literary criticism has illustrated the importance of writing about war during the Romantic period, this volume invites readers to redirect critical attention to move beyond discourses of war, and to recognize the era's complex and vibrant writing about and for peace.
Additional text
Bugg's book, Romanticism and Peace, is such a book. It's not that the reader doesn't already know that the period has moments of peace as well as the well-known conflicts of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; it's that one will almost immediately feel, upon beginning to read Bugg's book, that one has been looking the wrong-side up at the events of the time. One begins to wonder why one has ignored the outbreaks of peace that happened throughout the period and the effects those moments of peace had upon the literature of the time.
