Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years by Jeffrey N. Cox (review)

The opening of Romanticism in the Shadow of War features a revelatory counter-factual account of the far-flung travels that Lord Byron did not take in the war-torn years of 1809–1813. “What would Byron have made,” Jeffrey Cox asks, of a journey he could have but did not take through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, where the modern struggles born of imperialism and religious conflict were well underway (p. 12)? What if Byron had continued on from the Levant to meet the warrior and reformer, Mohammed Ali, self-proclaimed Khedive of Egypt and Sudan? Then: why not send the poet to Persia and the Caucasus, the ground of the contemporary Russo-Persian wars? And onward—to Afghanistan and India, and to the court of Rami II in Thailand? Pivot now and launch the wanderer toward the colonies of Latin America, embroiled in the Napoleonic conflict even as they seek independence; and to the frontier regions of the United States where, as with the Wahabis in Arabia, religious awakening is inseparable from bloodshed. “No more unlikely” than Byron’s actual encounter with Ali Pasha, Cox muses, would be his meeting with Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the “Shawnee Prophet,” whose zealous campaign for an independent nation in the upper Midwest ends disastrously in 1813, near present-day Detroit (p. 20). Imagine the author of The Giaour riding with the caballero-adventurers whose so-called Republican Army fails to liberate the territory of Texas (Tejas) in 1812.

Speculative transport allows Cox to make material points. First: our sense of Romanticism has been woefully narrow. He calls us to linger on the “borders of the vision” of our Eurocentric and still metaphysically oriented view of Romantic culture. Even if Byron did not exploit all these frontier lands, other writers of the age did: Cox reels off a dizzying list of examples. Second: once we recognize war as the global condition that “shadows” Romantic literature, we will have to explore border regions beyond even those visited by Childe Harold or Don Juan—frontier spaces where economic and cultural exchange met routinely with violence. Many of these spaces, Cox reminds us, remain sites of unrest. Under the ambivalent figure of the “border raid,” Cox assembles these encounters on the periphery of empire. “Expedition,” “sally,” and “foray” similarly signal a quasi-military, tactical rather than strategic, short-lived but potentially consequential activity, as often as not neglected by broad-stroke histories. Third: under the shadow of these global wars, our Romantic calendars blur: the “hot” dates of 1789, 1793, 1815, and 1819 give way in this study to the uneasiness of the Peace of Amiens (1802–1803), failures at the outset of the Regency (1811), False Peace in 1814, and lingering darkness (here Cox echoes Philip Shaw) after Waterloo. The fourth and most elaborated point of the book transfers these roughly military “expeditions” into the literary realm (p. 25). In response to the tragedy of war, Cox argues, Romantic writers conducted—with varying success—analogous “border raids,” stealing across the boundaries of genre and culture, language and faith. One might imagine Walter Scott standing center stage in such a study, but Cox casts the spotlight askance, usually to more politically radical figures. For him, their “experiments” or “raids” aimed to push beyond a war-wasted culture “seemingly unable to move forward” (p. 24). To do so they aimed to write, as Byron often did, beyond tragedy.

This seems to me Cox’s most pressing insight. If war casts a shadow upon Romanticism, tragedy may supply the very weave of that shadow. In an age when tragedy rarely ascended the stage, writers nonetheless composed wartime literature out of tragedy. At the heart of the book, then, beats this question: to what degree do the generic experiments and hybrid forms developed in the opening decades of the nineteenth century register but...