Reviews

S i m o n B a i n b r i d g e , British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii 259. $74. The French Revolution had its British counterpart in an explosion of paper bullets during the 1790s, pamphlets mobilized in a war of ideas. Major critical projects stem from this war, including M. H. Abramss supernaturalism and Tilottama Rajans historicism. What of the real bullets in the wars with France (17931815) that killed an astonishing 314,000 Britons? These wars occupied the youth of Byron, the young maturity of Wordsworth and maturity of Charlotte Smith, the infancy unto adulthood of the Shelleys, Felicia Hemans, and Keats. Yet until this 2003 book by Simon Bainbridgeforecast in his and others work in Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conict, 17931822, edited by Philip Shaw (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000)the French wars have not supplied a critical vocabulary for Romantic writing. Shaws Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and J. R. Watsons Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) are absorbing reading, but they do not confront critical challenges the way that Bainbridges British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars does challenges principally of a gendered discourse posed most famously for the periods history in a work that Bainbridge acknowledges, Linda Colleys Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992). In her own landmark study Coming Home: The Public Spaces of Romantic War (Studies in Romanticism, 33 [1994], 539 48), Mary A. Favret enlisted noted imaginative writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey as critics of a public discourse that, in mediating war, obscured its cost. For imaginative writers who would reveal that cost, she turned to previously unknown (and often female) authors of street ballads collected by Betty Bennett in her British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism, 17931815 (New York: Garland, 1976).

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Bainbridge takes up Favrets question of wars mediation, arguing that an array of noted writers did, after all, use a Romantic imagination to convey rather than obscure the realities of war or in Scotts case, even to create those realities. The discourse of war that emerges here moves in waves of feminization and masculinization, and Bainbridge uses his array of writers, now inclusive of gender, to expose and often demystify this gendered discourse of war. Bainbridge advances his discussion by engaging all of his cocontributors to Shaws collection (Stephen Behrendt, Jacqueline Labbe, and six others). In contrast, Shaws own Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995) engages but half of these and takes up none of the women writers who aid Behrendt and others in grappling with gendered discourse. Bainbridges valuable 1995 Napoleon and English Romanticism covered its topic without mentioning Mary Shelleys Napoleonic Castruccio in Valperga, but in British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Bainbridge places Smith and Hemans on an equal footing with Coleridge and Byron. At points in this book, a gendering of discourse meant to be intellectually freeing moves a bit quickly into assumptions about sexual difference that beg for proof. In this, Bainbridge does no worse than many an explorer of gender in Romantic culture. And he has certainly done his homework among the best of exemplars in this eld: Marlon Ross, Anne Mellor, Julie Ellison, Diego Saglia, Gary Kelly, and Susan Wolfson. Bainbridges rst chapter, an overview, counters Favret by bringing noted poetry into direct contact with the realities of war. Mary Robinsons The Camp mimetically depicts a military camp of the late 1790s, and (in the chapters leading anecdote) Walter Scotts The Lady of the Lake is read during an artillery ght in the Peninsular War. In the chapters earlier examples, an eighteenth-century Fancy transports poet and reader to the eld, fostering an anti-war sensibility alert to wars costs, while after 1800 a pro-war vigor emerges to resist and then impose that cost in its turn, defensively and offensively. In chapter 2, Smith and Coleridge in their 1790s work The Emigrants and Fears in Solitude use imagination to empathize with the wounds of war and deprivations of exile. They further conjure protective gures, maternal and paternal, for both the home front and the alien settlement camp. In chapter 3 a new anti-war vocabulary emerges, much the property of Robert Southey, who in the 1790s contributes not a maternal but a maiden gure, Joan of Arc. A dialogue with Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads moves Southey further into an epic vocabulary that opposes

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feminine sensibility. In chapter 4, coinciding with the invasion scares surrounding the Peace of Amiens, Wordsworth himself injects manly vigor into a poetry that called the nation to arms (p. 103): he masculinizes the sonnet, once associated with Gray, Smith, and sensibility. For his sonnets on Venice and Bonaparte, Bainbridge argues, Wordsworth also colonizes the maternal lately developed by Smith. Chapter 5 foregrounds Walter Scott, who for Bainbridge completes the masculinizing of war poetry in a roughened, picturesque form of chivalric romance viewed even as Homeric by Francis Jeffrey. The books central yet most exceptional gure, Scott made war familiar to a wide British audience but mystied it too in tales of past romance: for Bainbridge, Scott never portrayed present conict with conviction. This reader wondered if the great Minstrels romance of militarization should be an example of an obfuscating paper shield and not the direct portrayal of war that Bainbridge is seeking. The stakes are high, for the books Epilogue credits Scott with inuencing Britains and Americas development as warrior nations (p. 225) including his contribution of the presidential salute song, Hail to the Chief. Chapter 6 might be the books most compelling section, with its sampler of four poets on the Peninsular War (Hemans, Scott, Byron, and Southey), among whom Scott and Southey mythologize Napoleons incursion in Spain as the long-ago sexualized fall of Rodericks Gothic Spain to the Moors. The young Hemans balances legendary romance and contemporary militarization in her 1808 England and Spain. Scott experiments with a topical present in poems on Roderick and Waterloo but ends with a full-scale reversion to romance. Byron forwards sublimity and elegy and a woman warrior eroticized, Southey a gendering of war in which woman is by turns maternal victim and seductive villain and man (Roderick) an abuser redeemed to prophesy Spains resistance to Napoleon. Siege is the subject of chapter 7, as Byron and Hemans mount poetic studies of wars force that allude to historical sieges of Carthage, Murcia, Valencia, Constantinople, Rome, Corinth, Ismail, and Saragossa. Byron shows how the besieger, even the effeminate Don Juan, becomes dehumanized, a machine of war. Hemans has the besieged ghting famine and pestilence, a war on womens terms in which a male warrior class is useless (p. 196). The feminization suffered by Hemanss male governor in The Siege of Valencia interests Bainbridge less, however, than woman as failed leader at the city walls (Ximena) or, worse, temporizer with the enemy (Elmina). In discussing The Siege and The Wife of Asdrubal by Hemans, Bainbridge seems troubled by non-

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normative female roles and misses these works critical and prophetic overtones (the Valencian governer and his wife in debate over maternity and paternity in war; the wife of Carthages governor bearing the epithet Pythian ). A mystied vocabulary of soul (male) and heart (female) structures this section, making this reader wish for the authors acquaintance with Susan Wolfsons essay (not cited here), Gendering the Soul, in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1995), pp. 33 68. Bainbridge discerns the way in which gendered discourse can be revelatorybut he does not completely avoid the way it can seem prescriptive and adopt notions of masculinity and femininity as givens. In discussing Hemanss The Last Constantine, Bainbridge slides into blaming the victim, suggesting that Constantinople was defeated because it was effeminate, not (as others including myself have argued) that it was feminized by defeat. If gender preexists history in this way, then gendered discourse is denied its power as a historical phenomenon. On another point, since, as Bainbridge concedes, the wars with France were not particularly characterized by siege, the chapter might acknowledge gendered contingencies of battle conducted in the open eld as in Hemanss Woman on the Field of Battle. I point to the perils of gendered discourse here and call for further material instances of gender in war; but I also wish to credit the strides that Bainbridge has taken toward inclusion of Romantic-era writing and his admirable possession of current, relevant criticism. Further, I credit this books many intriguing notes about the gendering of particular literary and aesthetic ingredients in discourse (genre, meter, gure-ground relations) and its many telling notes on writers more briey glimpsed: Anne Yearsley, Hannah Cowley, Ann Barbauld, John Wilson Croker, Thomas Campbell, and Walter Savage Landor. I applaud this freshly engaged work. Nanora Sweet University of Missouri-St. Louis

C h r i s t o p h I r m s c h e r , Longfellow Redux. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. xx 350. $40. Ones impression is that Longfellow has settled permanently into the compact shelvingthat he has been gathering