Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832 (review)

The Romantic period in Britain corresponds not only with an impressive flowering of imaginative literature, but also, as Ian Haywood reminds us in his fascinating new study, Bloody Romanticism, with a series of 'catastrophically violent events' (2). Haywood's aim is to show that the connection between these two phenomena – the literature and the violence – runs deeper than critics have previously assumed. From New Criticism and the 'repressive hypothesis' to recent New Historicist readings of displaced violence and internalised terror, scholars of the period, says Haywood, have neglected some of the more direct ways in which the French Revolution, the slave trade, and the Irish rebellion shaped – and in turn were shaped by – the literature of the period. The key to the connection, Haywood argues, is the popular print culture of the day, wherein graphic images of violence circulated endlessly. A West Indian slave chained to a rack, beaten, disemboweled, and beheaded; a French princess dragged through the streets and torn limb from limb by a revolutionary mob; an Irish rebel hanged, fired upon with pistols, run through the body with a sword, and chopped up into pieces to be buried on the side of the road in front of his friends; an American woman 'scalped' and left for dead by 'a band of Indians' in the pay of British troops: these are just a few of the many gruesome scenes highlighted in Haywood's book.

Indeed, the sheer number of such scenes comprises an argument in its own right, one that challenges Michel Foucault's influential claim (in Discipline and Punish) that the public execution of Damien the regicide, in 1757, '[. . . ] marks the beginning of the end of "punishment as a spectacle"' (7). Foucault and the New Historicist critics who follow his line of thinking argue that in the late eighteenth century a shift occurred in the deployment of state power: punishment directed at the body was largely displaced by more institutional and internal methods of control. But Haywood demonstrates convincingly that the spectacle of violent punishment – or 'spectacular violence', as he terms it – continued well after the drawing and quartering of the unfortunate Damien. State power – Romanticism, too, as it happens – did not turn inward; it turned outward and spread across oceans and continents. Violent punishment may have become less exclusively associated with domestic affairs, where gagging acts and harassment proved equally effective at quashing anti-government sentiment. But it found a host of new occasions in a state-sponsored imperialism whose reach extended across the Atlantic and around the globe.

By 'spectacular' violence Haywood means both the 'extreme scale' of Romantic-era violence and its 'sensational mode of representation' (2). Drawing on eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility and the sublime, writers of the period developed new ways to represent the excessive violence of the slave-trade, the Jacobin 'Terror', the Napoleonic wars, and the Irish Rebellion. Haywood has written on print culture before; his last book charted a long revolution in popular literature across the Romantic and early Victorian periods. While Bloody Romanticism sticks to traditional Romantic-period boundaries, Haywood expands his popular focus to include 'literary' texts: in addition to pamphlets, journals, newspaper accounts, sermons, and popular poetry, Haywood discusses canonical works by William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Lord Byron. Haywood does not read these canonical works for references and reactions to grand historical events like the French Revolution or the Reform Act. Rather, he seeks to uncover the 'tropes' and 'techniques' first introduced by popular journalists, propagandists, moral crusaders, and memoirists to apprehend the shocking violence of the age. As Haywood explains it, popular print culture served as a kind of laboratory where these tropes and techniques were tested and circulated before finding their way into the literature of the period.

One such technique is what Haywood calls 'hyperbolic realism'. A somewhat awkward phrase, 'hyperbolic realism' captures a...