British Romanticism and Peace - Hardcover

by John Bugg (Author)

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.

Author Biography

John Bugg, Professor of English, Fordham University

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.