Britannia – serie

Long before Patrick O’Brian’s and C. S. Forester’s novels of the great age of combat sail, a vast popular poetry abounded in Britain about the war at sea against the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. This book tells the story of how that poetry, with its sailors and admirals as folk heroes, became a driving force for morale, national identity and patriotism that would flourish until 1918. Focusing on the sea poetry of Britain during that twenty-two year war, 1793-1815, the book shows how heretofore overlooked invasion poems, sea battle ballads, victory odes, seascapes and sailors’ elegies are crucial to a full understanding of literary, naval, and social history during the era of Nelson and Romanticism. The author opens a straight channel to link literary and military readerships and lays an important plank in the bridge of war literature arching from Homer to Hemingway.

Nicholas Breton (1545/55-1626?) was one of the most prolific writers of the Early Modern period and left behind a vast œuvre that is, however, largely neglected today. Breton addresses instrumental questions of his time, especially those of man’s identity. This study concentrates on a selection of Breton’s political texts in which Breton contrasts the Self against the Other. These texts not only stigmatise the Other as the undesired, the unknown and the indecipherable, but also construct a patriotic and uniform English identity to be imitated by all Englishmen and Englishwomen: the English Self.

Modernism in British arts, literature and philosophy is manifest as a unique thingaround and after 1900. This paradigm shift in all arts and modern science madetraditional beliefs, norms, and social patterns obsolete. Forerunners were 19th-centuryintellectuals, who favoured a new and lively spiritual culture. A new concept ofreality not only changed the view of nature (atomic physics) but also the structureand gist of literature. As the belief in the visible world declined, consciousness andsymbolism (surface and depth structures) occupied the focus of attention. Literaturebecame an autonomous field. From artistic subjectivity modernism led the way tocrystallizing creations of complex imaginative structures. Simultaneously, neorealismin philosophy and relativity in physics substituted a worn-out mechanistic worldpicture by a scientific reality reaching far beyond the visible world.

This anthology includes literary, legal and political texts mainly from the 1790s. They illustrate the dramatic circumstances under which several leading members of the radical reform movement in London were accused of high treason in 1794. The various radical and loyalist publications concerning these State Trials are indicative of England in the wake of the French Revolution – a society tormented by the fear of conspiracies. Certain social concerns and political agendas of that time remain essential for peace and freedom to this day – concerns about the dissolution of social values and institutions through radical reforms on the one hand, and striving for the distribution of knowledge, democratisation, political participation and social progress on the other hand.