Event Title
Session 2
Location
Centre de formation et de séminaires (CEFOS) in Remich/Luxembourg
Start Date
9-3-2013 12:00 PM
Description
Professor Emma Clery: “‘Ingenious speculations on the utter ruin of England’: Trauma and National Crisis in Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”
Respondent Professor Lisa Kasmer
ABSTRACT
Barbauld’s poem, published early in 1812, arose from deeply-felt moral opposition to the war against Napoleon. The start of the poem briefly alludes to the suffering experienced by civilian victims of the conflict, and the grief of the wives and mothers of soldiers. But she quickly turns from the expected objects of pity to pursue a different strategy: an assault on nationalist sentiment. The England of the near future is visualized in ruins, deserted, the destination of curious tourists from America. The defeat and destruction of the nation is represented as inevitable. The poem caused a storm of protest not only from the Tory press but even some of Barbauld’s friends and former allies. It was described as ‘cowardly’, ‘dastardly’, ‘unkindly and unpatriotic – we had almost said unfilial’. Past critics have tended to interpret the uproar as the inevitable backlash against a woman writer entering the realm of political debate in support of an unpopular cause. I argue that Barbauld’s ‘ingenious speculations on the utter ruin of England’ were a deliberate provocation, intended to bring home the trauma of war, in the interests of changing government policy. My research on the events surrounding the poem suggests that it was published as part of a concerted campaign, which against the odds, succeeded in its aims. The discussion here will touch on recent considerations of nationalism, trauma, war and the efficacy of imagery in protest literature by Martha Nussbaum, Susan Sontag, and others.
Session 2
Centre de formation et de séminaires (CEFOS) in Remich/Luxembourg
Professor Emma Clery: “‘Ingenious speculations on the utter ruin of England’: Trauma and National Crisis in Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”
Respondent Professor Lisa Kasmer
ABSTRACT
Barbauld’s poem, published early in 1812, arose from deeply-felt moral opposition to the war against Napoleon. The start of the poem briefly alludes to the suffering experienced by civilian victims of the conflict, and the grief of the wives and mothers of soldiers. But she quickly turns from the expected objects of pity to pursue a different strategy: an assault on nationalist sentiment. The England of the near future is visualized in ruins, deserted, the destination of curious tourists from America. The defeat and destruction of the nation is represented as inevitable. The poem caused a storm of protest not only from the Tory press but even some of Barbauld’s friends and former allies. It was described as ‘cowardly’, ‘dastardly’, ‘unkindly and unpatriotic – we had almost said unfilial’. Past critics have tended to interpret the uproar as the inevitable backlash against a woman writer entering the realm of political debate in support of an unpopular cause. I argue that Barbauld’s ‘ingenious speculations on the utter ruin of England’ were a deliberate provocation, intended to bring home the trauma of war, in the interests of changing government policy. My research on the events surrounding the poem suggests that it was published as part of a concerted campaign, which against the odds, succeeded in its aims. The discussion here will touch on recent considerations of nationalism, trauma, war and the efficacy of imagery in protest literature by Martha Nussbaum, Susan Sontag, and others.