“Lusitania weeps forlorn”: Portugal and melancholic nationhood in British literature of the Peninsular War
Stokes, C
Date: 2024
Article
Journal
European Romantic Review
Publisher
Routledge
Abstract
Whilst recent Romantic scholarship has shown how Iberia rose to prominence as an
imaginative Other for British nationhood during the Napoleonic Wars, accounts
overwhelmingly concentrate on Spain. Nevertheless, Anglo-Portuguese relations have a
distinct history, and British representations of Portugal have a distinctive tenor. ...
Whilst recent Romantic scholarship has shown how Iberia rose to prominence as an
imaginative Other for British nationhood during the Napoleonic Wars, accounts
overwhelmingly concentrate on Spain. Nevertheless, Anglo-Portuguese relations have a
distinct history, and British representations of Portugal have a distinctive tenor. Reflecting its
subordination to Britain and perceived historical decline, Portuguese identity is constructed
as melancholic: that is, Portugal as a nation in an elegiac relation to itself. Whilst, as such,
Portugal could be contained as a sentimentalized object, British authors who explored the
Portuguese as subjects produced texts that were often in tension with the bellicose norms
and styles of pro-war literature, especially compared to representations of Spain. I address
this phenomenon in a range of texts: poetry by Mary Mitford and George Grenville, novels
by Augusta Amelia Stuart and Anna Maria Porter, and a tragedy by John Wolcot. These works
show that Portugal was an unusual quantity within the assemblage of Britain’s discursive
relations with other nations, and that literary representations of Portugal had a unique,
generically unstable, and even subversive place in the literary field.
English and Creative Writing
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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