Napoleon and English Romanticism

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Cambridge University Press, 1995 M11 24 - 259 pages
Napoleon Bonaparte occupied a central place in the consciousness of many British writers of the Romantic period. He was a profound shaping influence on their thinking and writing, and a powerful symbolic and mythic figure whom they used to legitimize and discredit a wide range of political and aesthetic positions. In this first ever full-length study of Romantic writers' obsession with Napoleon, Simon Bainbridge focuses on the writings of the Lake poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and of Byron and Hazlitt. Combining detailed analyses of specific texts with broader historical and theoretical approaches, and illustrating his argument with the visual evidence of contemporary cartoons, Bainbridge shows how Romantic writers constructed, appropriated, and contested different Napoleons as a crucial part of their sustained and partisan engagement in the political and cultural debates of the day.

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Contents

Wordsworths Napoleonic
54
The Lake poets
95
Byron and Napoleon 18131814
134
The greatest event of modern times
153
Hazlitts Napoleonic riposte
183
The Age of Bronze
208
Bibliography
238
Index
253
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