“Lusitania weeps forlorn”: Portugal and melancholic nationhood in British literature of the Peninsular War

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. 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.