La Questione Romantica, Numero Speciale: 'Wars and Peace'

The inescapable presence and central significance of war discourse in Romantic-era writing have been recognized in relatively recent times. A number of landmark critical studies and anthologies, starting with the three hundred and fifty poems collected in Betty Bennett’s _British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism, 1793-1815_ [1976], have constructed over the last few decades a growing body of primary sources and diversified scholarly research. The field has recently expanded its scope to include ‘peace’, alongside war discourse, as an especially productive focus, responding to an increasing attentiveness towards «the thoughtful writing about peace that threads to the period as well», as John Bugg observes [2022, p. 3] reviewing the latest scholarly elaborations in the opening pages of his recent, thought-provoking study, British Romanticism and Peace. This special issue of La Questione Romantica aims to join the conversation, by addressing the topic from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from theatre and performance history, to culture-bound readings of individual writers, texts, and professional experiences; tracing the resonances of Romantic poetry across time in Wilfred Owen’s «poetry of witness» [Wu and Forché 2014], and offering novel approaches to canonical authors; broadening the scope to include essays in historically-bound as well as cross-historical discourse analysis. Most of the articles included in this «Wars and Peace» collection were originally presented in a conference under this heading, in the series of the Spring Seminars on Romanticism, which was held in Bari on 17-18 May 2023