Romanticism on the Battlefield: Representations of Conflict, 1793-1815

This dissertation analyzes the multifaceted representations of the battlefield by British Romantic poets in their responses to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, covering roughly the years 1793-1815. In the process, I articulate the way these poets engaged with the landscape of the battlefield as a means of accessing and representing scenes of distant conflict about which they did not themselves have experiential knowledge. By exploring the ways these authors invoked the generic and thematic structures of both the georgic mode and the Romantic fragment, this project emphasizes the ways in which poetic responses to the era’s conflict present the battlefield as a kind of text to be interpreted—a specific type of landscape materially marked by violence. These material markers express the meaning of the battle and the losses that occurred in these spaces. This equivocation between landscape and text facilitates the authors attempts to find a role for themselves in determining and expressing the meaning of the conflicts dominating their era, despite their inability to experience them directly, by foregrounding their interpretive abilities. I argue that through their invocation of the thematic qualities of the Romantic fragment many of the writers in this study reach towards an understanding of the ways in which violence fragments and distorts meaning—moving away from a traditional understanding of the Romantic fragment and gesturing towards a Modernist sensibility. While a majority of scholarly attention in the field has focused on Romantic era representations of war as a mediated form of deferral that sublimates war’s damages, I argue that by focusing on poetic representations of the battlefield we can better understand how writers of this era open up a space in which they can consider the fragmenting and discordant effect violence has on the process of meaning-making and can represent what they themselves have not experienced.