Shelley's Wars, Burke's Revolutions

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, the traditional picture of Romanticism as an age of revolution has been significantly complicated by discussions of the protracted military campaigns that took place in Europe between 1792 and 1815 and in the colonies for much longer. As Mary Favret has suggested, understanding the art and literature of this period requires that we acknowledge that “Romantic writers found it nearly impossible to imagine any space or time free from the pains . . . of warfare” (609). While earlier scholarship concentrated on the aesthetic ramifications of discrete political events, particularly the French Revolution, we now give equal consideration to the militarization of experience endemic to European capitalism and imperialism and the resulting collapse of the distinction between wartime and peacetime. This reorientation of the critical focus has been extremely productive, allowing for important reassessments of canonical topics and texts. At the same time, this shift has occurred with little if any attention to how the Romantics themselves understood the relationship between war and revolution.1 The goal of this essay is to elucidate this aspect of the Romantic legacy. The first section explores the volatility of the word “revo-