Consequential ground: Memorials of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Romantic culture 1793-1877

As we mark the bicentenary of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars what memorials of the wars have we inherited? And who bequeathed that inheritance to posterity? From the Victorian monuments that remain, it would seem that the heritage of war was coherently patriotic and evidence of a pro-war, pro-victory popular culture. But there’s another heritage of war that time has obscured: the failures to remember, the ambivalent erasures of war, and the anti-heroic memorial culture that thrived in politically progressive circles during and after the wars. Although one legacy of the wars is a patriotic myth of England’s martial preparedness embodied in monuments to the likes of Wellington and Nelson, this dissertation will argue that our modern conceptions of Britain’s national heritage are dependent upon a different legacy: the Romantic-era critiques of literary radicals against public war memorials. The intellectual roots of heritage consciousness in Britain run through literature that changed the way that Britons remembered the loss occasioned by war. Romantic writers promoted a conception of historical property as a collective inheritance, and in the process of disputing the memory of individual war heroes, they created the cultural conditions under which the charitable heritage societies of the late Victorian era would succeed in the work of preserving the past for all.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Sellers Jr., Edward Jordan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Underwood, Ted
• Nazar, Hina
• Wood, Gillen D.
• Hay, James

• Napoleonic Wars
• heritage
• historic sites
• tourism
• war in literature
• Waterloo
• Romanticism
• monuments
• memorials
• radicalism
• Great Britain
• Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850
• Thelwall, John, 1764-1834
• Radcliffe, Ann Ward, 1764-1823
• Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne, 1793-1835
• Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771-1832
• Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
• Seacole, Mary, 1805-1881
• Hill, Octavia, 1838-1912
• Elliot, Ebenezer, 1781-1849
• Godwin, William, 1756-1836
• Ruskin, John, 1819-1900
• Nelson, Horatio Nelson, Viscount, 1758-1805
• Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 1769-1852

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Jordan Sellers (Edward Jordan Sellers Jr.)

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106186

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/106186