Napoleon and English Romanticism

Napoleon Bonaparte occupied a central place in the consciousness of many British writers of the Romantic period. In this first full-length study of Romantic writers' obsession with Napoleon, Simon Bainbridge focuses on the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron and Hazlitt. Combining detailed textual analysis with historical and theoretical approaches, and illustrating his argument with contemporary cartoons, Bainbridge shows how Romantic writers constructed and contested different Napoleons as part of their partisan engagement in political and cultural debate.