Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2023 Marilyn Gaull Book Award.

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780198839668

Table of Contents

Reviews

Bugg situates his analysis in a rich interdisciplinary archive of writing. * Mark Canuel, University of Illinois Chicago, Modern Philology *

Bugg situates his analysis in a rich interdisciplinary archive of writing. * Mark Canuel, University of Illinois Chicago, Modern Philology * This study insists on the human potential for peace. It places current scholarship in peace studies in conversation with the rich and complex discourse on peace in Britain from the end of the American War of Independence through the aftermath of Waterloo. The book calls its readers to treat peace not as the mere cessation of war but as an active pursuit and positive presence. * Mary Favret, The Wordsworth Circle * John Bugg's British Romanticism and Peace demands a shift of emphasis and attention, warning of the dangers of acceding to war's dominion...British Romanticism and Peace, where the achievement of peace awakens and reawakens the reader to the need for resistance, struggle, and work. And for good reason. * Mary A. Favret, Johns Hopkins University, The Wordsworth Circle Vol 54.4 * Bugg underscores what he considers the anachronistic danger of projecting modern assumptions about the inevitability of war onto the early nineteenth century. This is not simply a matter of historical precision, but also of human capacity and hope. Bugg makes a persuasive and moving case that peace is not merely a gap between battles, but a positive condition, indeed the foundation of a just society. * Jennifer Davis Michael, The Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge. *

Bugg situates his analysis in a rich interdisciplinary archive of writing. * Mark Canuel, University of Illinois Chicago, Modern Philology * This study insists on the human potential for peace. It places current scholarship in peace studies in conversation with the rich and complex discourse on peace in Britain from the end of the American War of Independence through the aftermath of Waterloo. The book calls its readers to treat peace not as the mere cessation of war but as an active pursuit and positive presence. * Mary Favret, The Wordsworth Circle * John Bugg's British Romanticism and Peace demands a shift of emphasis and attention, warning of the dangers of acceding to war's dominion...British Romanticism and Peace, where the achievement of peace awakens and reawakens the reader to the need for resistance, struggle, and work. And for good reason. * Mary A. Favret, Johns Hopkins University, The Wordsworth Circle Vol 54.4 *

Author Information

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.

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